Tech Firms Take Down Ill-Informed Posts on Virus

"It was definitely, within the companies, a shift,” Andy Pattison, the WHO's manager of digital solutions, told the Associated Press.

Now Pattison and his team flag misleading information on the virus and sometimes lobby for misinformation to be removed from Facebook, Google and YouTube.

Falsehoods long a problem

Misinformation and disinformation, which is false information deliberately spread to sway opinion or obscure the truth, long have lurked on social media. But now the stakes are higher.

"There's really a wide range of different kinds of harms associated with misinformation generally, and specifically in this case of coronavirus,” says Dipayan Ghosh, codirector of the Digital Platforms & Democracy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School. These range from people making uninformed political decisions to death, Ghosh says. And because of the grave risks, the platforms could potentially be considered responsible if something terrible happens, he says.

Angie Drobnic Holan, editor in chief of PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact-checking organization in Washington, says people create and spread misinformation for reasons including profit or political ideology or because they think — mistakenly — the information is correct.

PolitiFact is one of the fact-checking groups partnering with Facebook. In recent weeks, all of the content PolitiFact has checked is related to the virus, including the claim about drinking bleach. Its site, PolitiFact.com, is also investigating coronavirus claims and rating them on a Truth-O-Meter with colors ranging from red (false) to green (true).

"It's overwhelmed the national conversation,” Holan says.

It's also energized those who educate the public so facts win out over fiction.

"People in the information community are really activated like never before,” Holan says. “There are all kinds of conversations happening among fact checkers, journalists, the platforms, philanthropies about how to make sure people have good, solid, factual information."

Talks with platforms

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has provided health information to a number of platforms, including Facebook and Google, says Benjamin Haynes, an agency spokesman. The discussions have included how linking to CDC content in a variety of ways could help users track down credible content and stave off misinformation.

The responses by different companies have been both proactive and reactive, says Ghosh. Google, for example, is proactively providing information on the number of coronavirus cases in a user's county, state and country and giving links to the WHO. It also includes COVID-19 alerts and lists of “Common questions” and “Common searches” when a user searches for virus-related material.

Reactive responses include using content-moderation algorithms to identify posts that contain misinformation and having users flag potential misinformation, Ghosh says.

The problem with reactive responses is that the misinformation is out there before it is taken down. YouTube, for example, removed videos that said 5G wireless networks caused the virus. Some of those videos had hundreds of thousands of views before they were taken down, the AP said.

Mission impossible

Even with the stepped-up efforts, it is impossible for the social media platforms to catch all the misinformation online, according to Holan, who urges people to be wary about what they forward or share.

Everyone — from tech companies to journalists to governments to average people — has a role to play, she says, since “misinformation is not a problem that only one group is going to solve."