VOICE OVER: As the COVID-19 epidemic sweeps across the world,
it's been accompanied by a tsunami of misinformation.
"Drink lemon and bicarbonate. Oh my god..."
"Salt water, chloroquine."
"Hold your breath over ten seconds to check if your lung is healthy."
"If you keep sipping hot water, that washes it down to your stomach."
VOICE OVER: At a time when reliable information is vital for public health,
fake news about COVID-19 might be spreading even faster than the facts.
TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS: We're not just fighting an epidemic. We're fighting an infodemic.
Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous.
VOICE OVER: Researchers across the globe are working to understand how misinformation spreads,
and new models suggest that while the fight against fake news can seem hopeless,
it might not take too much effort to tip the balance.
The Reuters Institute at Oxford University has been looking at samples of fake news
picked up by international fact checkers.
This is J. Scott Brennen.
J SCOTT BRENNEN: So, I think before we started, I would have guessed that most of the claims
had to do with health information or health misinformation.
But what we saw was that the most common type of claim had to do
with the actions or policies of public authorities.
VOICE OVER: Scott and his team analysed the content, origin and reach of 225 pieces of fake news.
SCOTT: About 60% of the content involved recontextualising, reworking or reframing
a grain of truth or a true fact in a way that it was no longer true.
VOICE OVER: For instance, one video claimed to show crows in the centre of Wuhan
at the height of the pandemic, with text implying they were attracted by dead bodies.
SCOTT: In fact, this video was from another city in China, 1,000 miles away.
While it did show crows, those crows being right in the city had nothing do with the pandemic at all.
VOICE OVER: The team also found that mainstream media was not exempt from spreading fake news.
SCOTT: We did see a significant amount of misinformation in the sample that was on television -
things like press conferences or presidential debates -
and that could also be a very significant channel of this type of misinformation.
VOICE OVER: At the University of East Anglia, virologist Paul Hunter
has been studying the damage caused by misinformation since 2015
when he saw the impact of fake news on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
PAUL HUNTER: We were hearing reports there that people were believing this was a deliberate attack
by the government against dissenters,
and there were actually episodes of healthcare workers being murdered as a result.
And indeed, subsequent research showed that people who believed these lies
were less likely to do things to protect their lives.
VOICE OVER: Paul joined forces with statistician Julii Brainard
to model how misinformation affects the spread of a disease.
JULII BRAINARD: Each one of those little people has their own little probabilities attached to them
about the behaviour they're going to do, which is meant to reflect that they all make slightly different decisions.
VOICE OVER: The individuals in the model make decisions about whether or not to believe fake news,
whether or not to pass it on, and whether to change their behaviour as a result,
potentially putting themselves at higher risk of catching or passing on the disease.
All these decisions are based on data collected from a whole range of peer-reviewed studies
from various historical disease outbreaks.
Changing the parameters of the model and running it thousands of times gave Paul and Julii
an insight into the power of fake news during an epidemic.
JULII: Something I didn’t expect was how small the change had to be in the information balance,
and I only had to tilt that ever so slightly - make it 60% good advice and 40% bad advice -
to sort of cancel out the effects of the bad advice.
VOICE OVER: The WHO have already taken note of Paul and Julii's findings in their communications strategy.
JULII: When I look at my social media right now, I can tell that's the strategy they're using.
They're just flooding the system with the good quality, safe, solid information.
VOICE OVER: Meanwhile, governments and public authorities
are having mixed results in the fight against fake news.
SCOTT: The fact that there's so much of this misinformation about public authorities,
it could be very difficult for these organisations to try and dispel, you know, this misinformation,
so that's where independent fact checkers who are not associated with these public authorities
can do really important work.
VOICE OVER: According to Scott’s research, people are beginning to question online news sources.
They’re making decisions not to pass things on
and choosing news sources which they consider to be more reputable,
all of which Paul and Julii’s model suggests will make a big difference.
JULII: What I've shown in principle is how people being resistant to bad advice –
I mean, I've called it 'immunised' here but it's not against disease, it's against bad information –
being resistant, not sharing the advice, not believing it, not acting on it,
those people can actually slow down bad advice that might encourage people into unsafe behaviour.
PAUL: I think to me, the most important conclusions of the work is that you can think about
misinformation and disinformation in the same way that you think about the actual virus itself.
Even being able to reduce some of the misinformation by about 30%
might be enough to actually substantially reduce the impact
and hopefully thereby save lives.