Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation During the COVID-19 / SARS-Cov-2 Pandemic
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Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation During the COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic Submission to the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media 19th June, 2019 Dr Carlo Kopp Biological versus Digital Pandemics Australia, like other democracies, has suffered from a deluge of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation related to the COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 pandemic1. Like other democracies, this deluge of falsehoods has produced social discord and adversely influenced public understanding of the pandemic, and how to deal with these unusual and challenging circumstances. Foreign nation states and non-state actors have been major producers of these falsehoods and therefore merit close attention. The best starting point for appreciating the potential and actual impacts of the digital COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is to explore the remarkable similarities between the spread of deceptive content in digital media, and biological pandemics. Jointly with Drs Korb and Mills, the author2 published research in late 2018 that exposes both the sensitivity of a population to the effects of “fake news”, and the sensitivity of “fake news” to costs incurred, leading us to subsequently provide evidence to the UK Parliament’s DCMS Select Committee’s Inquiry on Disinformation and ‘Fake News’, and the JSCEM in Australia. Many observations in this submission are drawn from that evidence. An important finding from our 2017-2018 research effort was that deceptive messaging in social media can produce serious disruption in consensus forming behaviors in groups of users. Since democracies rely upon some degree of consensus to function, these disruptive effects can produce impacts out of all proportion to the effort invested in producing them. We found that even a remarkably small percentage of deceivers in a population, in our simulations less that 1%, could catastrophically disrupt cooperative behaviours in the simulated population. In the extreme case of cost-free deceptions, where “fake news” producers in the simulated population are unhindered in any way, cooperative behaviours vanished altogether. Put bluntly, almost everybody ended up deceiving everybody else. 1 We employ the EU definitions, where misinformation is unintentional, disinformation is intentional, and malinformation is the exclusion of critical facts to produce a misleading conclusion or false belief in the mind of the victim. The latter is a common feature of narrative driven hyper-partisan media coverage where facts are considered less important than the partisan narrative being promoted. 2 The author is a university computer science researcher with an interest in the problem of “fake news”, encompassing exactly the kind of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation observed during this pandemic. The author’s prior research in Information Warfare dealt in part specifically with the problem of modeling nation state propaganda deceptions and the underlying mechanisms of how they capture or disrupt their victim audiences. 3 A related observation is that the traditional view of propaganda being intended to “turn” an audience to the propagandist’s viewpoint is incomplete. In general deceptions can produce two impacts on a victim. One impact is a false belief, that represents the traditional intent of propaganda, and the other impact is uncertainty or confusion, that tends to cause decision paralysis in its victims. Contemporary propaganda deceptions often aim for no more than to create uncertainty or confusion in victim audiences, that might otherwise require significantly greater effort to “turn” to the propagandist’s asserted viewpoint. Confused consumers of such information will often withdraw from a social media engagement or public debate leaving the field to the propagandist uncontested. Another related observation is that empirical study of social media data and agent based modeling and simulation of deceptions in social media show that the spread of social media deceptions often exactly fits mathematical models originally developed for modelling the spread of biological pathogens. The main difference in the spreading of social media deceptions is the timescale and footprint, as a person infected with a biological pathogen might on average infect another five people, and this might take several days to happen. When deceptions are spread in social media, the “digital pathogen” can be spread to millions of people across a social media platform in almost as little time as it takes to read the message and hit the “share” button. The similarities between biological and digital pandemics extend well beyond identical spreading behaviours. A critical problem observed in the COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is what epidemiologists term “cryptic transmission”, where the pathogen is being quietly spread by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic patients. As no cases end up being detected, they cannot be identified and isolated to protect others. We observe a directly analogous problem with email and encrypted messenger tools such as WhatsApp, WickrMe and Telegram, which have become covert channels for the spread of COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 misinformation, disinformation and malinformation (a most notable example being a deceptive claim in Nigeria spread via WhatsApp about the use of hydroxychloroQuine that led to multiple cases of overdose and hospitalisation). The popularity of such encrypted messenger tools is because they frustrate intrusive surveillance by governments and platform providers – this eQually so frustrates provider efforts to locate and delete deceptive and especially dangerous messages. Since the onset of this pandemic the author has received multiple reQuests from friends and colleagues concerning such messages being spread by email –“is this a fake or not?” – and in all instances the messages were indeed fakes. Often these fake reports were artfully crafted so that only a subject matter expert would recognize that they were actually fakes. Another notable similarity between biological and digital pandemics is that both mutate and evolve over time, as they adapt to their victims to maximize their spread. 4 In social and mass media, these mutations clearly arise as a narrative or claim is misunderstood, or embellished while being spread. The rapidly evolution of false and misleading narratives and claims presents serious challenges in public communication and education, presenting the proverbial “moving target”3. The COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 “Deception Pandemic” The scope and scale of the misinformation, disinformation and malinformation being distributed globally during the COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is unprecedented and without any doubt dwarfs the two previous benchmarks, the UK Brexit vote and the US 2016 Presidential Election. In part this reflects the global footprint of the viral pandemic, and in part it reflects nation state players concurrently targeting domestic and foreign audiences. A uniQue feature of the COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 “Deception Pandemic” is that much of the public and media debate is related to the scientific and medical effort in areas related to the biological pandemic, specifically epidemiology, virology, immunology, zoonosis, and the development of antiviral treatments, drugs and vaccines. Unlike politics where public and mass media tend to have good literacy and reasonable understanding, science does not enjoy that level of lay audience appreciation or understanding. As a result conscious and unconsciousness filters that might otherwise lead to the detection and rejection of false and misleading claims and narratives are far too often absent, and any nonsense will then be accepted as fact without Question, despite it being instantly recognized to be nonsense by scientists and medical practicioners. This problem is further compounded by the rapid evolution of scientific understanding of the pathogen and its epidemiological behaviour as data is collected and analysed, and experimental work performed to improve understanding. Scientific consensus on the nature of the pathogen, its possible origins, its effects on its victims, and its spreading behavior has evolved very strongly since the first atypical pneumonia cases were manifested in Italy last November, and in China prior to that. For media and public accustomed to political debates where facts tend to be fixed in time, the rapidly evolving scientific debate on the virus and pandemic presents as a bewildering and ever changing landscape of factoids, observations and opinions many of which appear to be contradictory, and may indeed be such as data excludes previously accepted hypotheses. 3 A practice attributed to Russian propagandists has been the spreading of large numbers of deceptive claims in social media to identify which of these are most effective in capturing the audience, and then deploying the most effective deceptions via other channels. This is a direct analogue to the selective natural amplification of more contagious mutations commonly observed in biological viruses. 5 A good instance are the agreed symptoms of the disease, which six months ago were seen to be atypical pneumonia and high temperatures, and now encompass at least nine major symptoms. Spreading behavior was initially thought to be only via expelled droplets during coughing and sneezing, and now includes exhaled aerosols, bodily fluids and droplets on surfaces. There is no current scientific consensus on immunity, viability of specific vaccines and effectiveness of treatments,