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Authors:
Robert Nemeth and
Marius Dragomir
SEPTEMBER 2021
FACT-CHECKING COVID-19
MISINFORMATION:
WIN SOME, LOSE SOME
The spread of misinformation related to the Covid-
19 pandemic created new headaches for fact-
checkers around the world. Some launched new
organizations, others intensified their debunking
efforts and shifted their focus. However,
misinformation seems to move faster than any of
them.
Providing accurate information is always critical, especially in times of emergency
when false news can literally cost lives. However, the Covid-19 pandemic that forced
almost the entire world into lockdown for months showed that even in such
circumstances misinformation spreads faster than the virus itself.
The World Health Organization (WHO) even created a new term, infodemic, to
describe the situation, defined as “too much information including false or
misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease
outbreak. It causes confusion and risk-taking behaviors that can harm health. It also
leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines the public health response.
An infodemic can intensify or lengthen outbreaks when people are unsure about
what they need to do to protect their health and the health of people around them.”
The WHO also issued a joint statement along with several United Nations (UN)
bodies (UNICEF, UNDP, UNESCO, UNAIDS, ITU, UN Global Pulse), and the
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), claiming
that this is the first pandemic in history when “technology and social media are
being used on a massive scale to keep people safe, informed, productive and
connected. At the same time, the technology we rely on to keep connected and
informed is enabling and amplifying an infodemic that continues to undermine the
global response and jeopardizes measures to control the pandemic.”
In addition to the growing general distrust in media and politics, there are various
reasons why the pandemic quickly turned into an infodemic including lack of
government data, underdeveloped health systems that struggle to handle endemic
diseases, and the inability of many news organizations to cover such crises without
resorting to sensationalism.
As a result, anyone who does a quick search online will find endless false news items
about the pandemic. According to a Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation
Review article, such content ranges from harmless false cures to dangerous rhetoric
targeting minorities.
These trends have alerted the fact-checking community as well. The authors of the
Harvard article found “a significant increase in the debunking efforts of fact-
checking organizations in 2020” driven mostly by Covid-related misinformation. As
a joint effort, more than 100 fact-checkers around the world were brought together
by the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute to create the
#CoronaVirusFacts / #DatosCoronaVirus Alliance. In addition to debunking false
news items and conspiracy theories, the Alliance also publishes, shares and
translates facts about the pandemic in more than 40 languages.
The infodemic not only prompted existing fact-checking groups to step up their
debunking efforts, but it also led to the rise of a spate of new organizations that were
established precisely for this purpose.
Tackling the Infodemic
2
One of these organizations, Journalistes Solidaires (JS) was launched in March 2020
in France where “the flood of misinformation caught the media system a bit off
guard,” said Clément Legros, a journalist working with JS. Moreover, fact-checking
in French newsrooms isn’t as common as, for example, in American news media.
Hence, several journalists realized that it was time to help the audience gain access
to verified information. Some of them responded to an appeal to join JS, which was
posted on Facebook by one of the group's founding members. “Considering the
mistrust people felt for the media, Journalistes Solidaires organized itself as an
open-newsroom,” Legros said, adding that JS consists of journalists from France and
Belgium who produce good content at a rapid pace, and that it is collaborative, and
“hundred percent transparent and accessible for its audience.”
The original idea was to identify misinformation, investigate and debunk it, and
then communicate the results to the audience, says another journalist from the
group, Cypriane El-Chami. “We tried to respond to misinformation where we
found and observed it. And we decided to counter it in its field: social networks,”
Legros said.
To achieve its objectives, JS is focusing on short videos that are distributed on social
networks. “Our aim was to offer the substance of debunk in a different format from
the traditional written article and to take into account the preference for video on
the social networks,” Legros said. JS also tried to be mindful of people’s preferences
who don’t consume mainstream media and would not read long articles, El-Chami
said.
This strategy had mixed results: while some of JS’s videos have been viewed
thousands of times, like the one investigating the effects of the virus on the immune
system, some haven’t really found their audience. “We did not set ourselves a
quantitative objective for the distribution of our videos, only an obligation in terms
of format, which was to [convey] the core of the information but in a different way,”
said Legros.
While misinformation keeps spreading, JS keeps facing renewed challenges.
Partnering with mainstream media would help increase their impact, but now most
of these news media have their own fact-checking desks. “They are less interested in
cooperation,” said El-Chami.
In the meantime, the group’s journalists set their sights on new topics. Without
ceasing to debunk false news items about Covid-19, they aim to investigate the
upcoming presidential elections in France. “The rise of populism on this occasion
and the climate situation seem to us at the moment to be subjects of legitimate
concern as they are accompanied by misinformation,” said Legros.
Fighting Disinformation in France:
Use a Video
3
As the Covid-19 pandemic reached Nepal, misinformation about it started to spread
as well. Nepal was another country without a fact-checking culture, and the
pandemic exposed it widely, Ghamaraj Luitel, a media educator at the Central
Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the Tribhuvan University
said to Online Khabar, an English-language journal.
As a response, Nepal Fact-Check was launched by the Center for Media Research-
Nepal (CMR-Nepal), a local NGO, in March 2020. “There was a lot of fear among
the public regarding the coronavirus, and the fear was fueled by misinformation
spreading fast and quick through social media and communication channels,” said
CMR-Nepal’s Umesh Shrestha. With his colleagues, he saw that misinformation was
mostly “propagated by influencers and ‘credible’ people” who even themselves were
so duped to believe that what they shared was true.
Since such false news spread mostly on social media, the social networks' users
became the organization’s primary target audience. “Debunking these [lies] on a
website would be a mismatch” as this content would not reach the same audience,
said Ujjwal Prajapati, a media researcher with CMR-Nepal. “We need to reach them
on the same platform where they receive misinformation, and in the same way they
receive it”.
To reach such audiences, the CMR-Nepal’s fact-checkers partnered with
Mysansar.com, the most popular Nepali blog, to co-publish their debunks, and
created their own social media channels (on Facebook, Twitter and Viber).
“We have a very good response from the public,” said Shrestha. “We also saw a rise
in newspaper reports and articles about fact-checking since NepalFactCheck.org was
launched.”
Indeed, some of the group’s debunking work had a substantial impact. For example,
because of their work, the US Embassy in Kathmandu corrected a press statement
that contained incorrect information. When virologists published social media posts
about Chinese vaccines being donated to Nepal, the group discovered that “they had
wrongly claimed that the vaccine was not the one that WHO has approved for
emergency use, but the other one still in the trial phase,” Shrestha said. After the
debunk, the experts deleted or corrected their posts, some even apologizing for the
mistake.
The fact-checks had an impact on social media influencers as well, according to
Shrestha. Some deleted the debunked posts, others apologized for the mistakes, and
a few even thanked the fact-checkers for the corrections.
The group also started to fact-check misinformation not related to the pandemic,
with more or less the same success. For example, Center for Investigative
Journalism, a local partner of the International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists (ICIJ), corrected a fact in its reporting on ICIJ’s FinCen files where “it has
claimed that one of the companies involved was not registered in Nepal, which in
fact was registered,” Sheshtra said.
Nepal: Fighting on Social Media
4
NepalFactCheck now wants to broaden both its focus and activities: they plan to
organize fact-checking training sessions, but also to look into the possibility to
expand their team, thinking of covering the upcoming elections next year.
Zambia: Fighting Online and Offline
In recent months, Southern African countries have also experienced a rise in
infection rates along with a new wave of misinformation. False news items
penetrated a variety of topics: possible (and ineffective) treatments as well as the
“dangers” of vaccinations. "We see a lot of misinformation about unproven cures for
coronavirus being shared on WhatsApp groups," Peter Deselaers, DW Akademie’s
program director for Namibia and Southern Africa told Deutsche Welle.
In Africa, radio is still a key source of information, and many local fact-checking
organizations aim to reach their audiences via radio, so the spread of online
misinformation created new challenges for them. “[It] was quite a difficulty
considering that most of our audience are community media personnel and radio-
listening clubs who mostly access and share content offline,” said Vusumuzi Sifile,
executive director of Panos Institute Southern Africa (PSAf), a non-profit
organization based in Zambia.
Organizing remote discussions by phone or online conferencing tools was yet
another challenge. “This compelled us to take steps to equip the media houses to
integrate some technology-based tools into their normal routines,” Sifile said.
With its pandemic-related fact-checking, PSAf targeted mostly media practitioners,
decision-makers, but also the general public. Its aim was not only to debunk
misinformation, but also to prevent it from spreading. The organization has a
platform where it can receive tips via WhatsApp, text messages or emails. “The
scourge of misinformation around Covid-19 is so massive, and requires concerted
multi-stakeholder efforts,” said Sifile. “Every day there are all sorts of new waves of
misinformation about the pandemic. This requires a high level of alertness.”
Still, based on reactions and feedback, Sifile thinks that their audience increasingly
understands the dangers of misinformation related to the pandemic. “However,
some of them still go ahead and spread unverified or unverifiable content,” Sifile
said. “This calls for continuous and multi-pronged sensitization and capacity
building on not only identifying, but also mitigating misinformation on Covid-19
and other challenges.”
As the pandemic affects all sectors of life, PSAf has been working to set up “a multi-
theme fact-checking center that will also support the media to produce and
disseminate verified content.” They have already launched a new platform, iVerify
Zambia Fact Checking Mechanism, which is focused on identifying and mitigating
misinformation, disinformation and hate speech during elections and beyond.
5
The authors of the Harvard article claim that “in many places, engagement with
coronavirus-related content drove a large percentage of overall user engagement
with fact-checking content, and the capacity organizations developed to address
coronavirus-related misinformation was later deployed to debunk misinformation
on other topics.”
Nevertheless, they also found that “user engagement did not follow as clear a
pattern as the increase in fact checkers’ activity. Coronavirus may have driven user
engagement in the early months of the pandemic, but region-specific salient events
and one-off viral tweets influenced user engagement in the later months of 2020.”
While fact-checking organizations have been making efforts to tackle the
infodemic, and have been in many cases successful in engaging their audiences, it
seems that keeping up with the rapid pace of false news production and distribution
is a difficult, if not impossible, mission.
The Outlook
6
Robert Nemeth
is
Communications
and
Outreach
Officer
at
CEU
Democracy
Institute,
and
Editor
of
Review
of
Democracy.
Previously
he
was
Outreach
Coordinator
at
the
Center
for
Media,
Data
and
Society
(
CMDS
)
where
he
was
responsible
for
the
communication
and
dissemination
of
the
Center
'
s
projects,
programs
and
publications.
Prior
to
joining
CEU,
he
had
a
15
-
year
-
long
career
in
journalism
working
for
different
Hungarian
TV
stations
and
online
media
outlets
in
various
positions
ranging
from
journalist
to
senior
editor
and
news
producer.
He
also
served
as
Content
Project
Manager
for
the
European
Maccabi
Games
2019.
Previously,
he
graduated
in
History
and
in
Media
Studies
at
the
Eötvös
Loránd
University
(
ELTE
)
in
Budapest,
then
obtained
an
MA
in
Sociology
and
Social
Anthropology
at
Central
European
University.
He
also
works
part
-
time
for
Minority
Rights
Group
Europe
as
a
Media
and
Communications
Consultant
and
is
a
guest
lecturer
at
the
Department
of
Media
and
Communications
at
ELTE.
Marius Dragomir
is
Director
of
CMDS,
and
Senior
Manager
at
CEU
Democracy
Institute.
He
previously
worked
for
the
Open
Society
Foundations
(
OSF
)
for
over
a
decade:
he
has
managed
the
research
and
policy
portfolio
of
the
Program
on
Independent
Journalism
(
PIJ
)
,
formerly
the
Network
Media
Program,
in
London.
He
has
also
been
one
of
the
main
editors
for
PIJ
’
s
flagship
research
and
advocacy
project,
Mapping
Digital
Media,
which
became
the
largest
policy
research
project
ever.
He
was
the
main
writer
and
editor
of
OSF
’
s
Television
Across
Europe,
a
comparative
study
of
broadcast
policies
in
20
European
countries.
He
has
been
advising
international
organizations
including
Council
of
Europe
where
he
serves
as
a
member
of
the
Committee
of
Experts
on
Media
Environment
and
Reform,
and
UNESCO,
where
he
has
been
sitting
on
the
advisory
board
of
the
organization
’
s
World
Trends
in
Media
Freedom
Project.
In
2015,
with
a
group
of
journalists
and
researchers,
he
co
-
founded
MediaPowerMonitor,
a
community
of
experts
in
media
policy
covering
trends
in
regulation,
business,
and
politics
that
influence
journalism.
Tel:
+
36
1
327
3000
/
2609
Fax:
+
36
1
235
6168
E
-
mail:
cmds
@
ceu.edu
cmds.ceu.edu
Postal address:
Center
for
Media,
Data
and
Society
Central
European
University
Nador
u.
9
1051
Budapest
Hungary
Cover
photo:
Unsplash
/
Maxime
AUTHORS