S1E56 / Flattening the Infodemic Curve / Claire Wardle, John Cook, Renee DiResta

So it was just sort of almost like a conspiracy correlation matrix. It just said, you know, hey, you're interested, you follow these conspiracy groups, maybe you'd like these other conspiracy groups.

We're never going to solve information pollution. We need to equip people with the skills to navigate it.

You're listening to Epidemic, the podcast about the science, public health, and social impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. I'm your host, Dr. Celine Gounder. Back in 2007, John Cook was at a family party. He was having a good time until he got pulled into one of those uncomfortable moments. He got into an argument with his father-in-law.

So he is a climate denier, and at our family get-together, he threw all these different climate myths at me. And I went away and researched them, just tried to find out what the truth was about these different arguments.

John wasn't really all that interested in climate change. He wasn't an activist and didn't really follow it that closely. But that didn't matter. John just didn't like the idea of losing.

And like any competitive son-in-law that wants to make sure they win the next argument with their father-in-law, I started building a list of the possible arguments that I might encounter at the next family get-together.

But as he was trying to one-up his father-in-law, John actually learned a lot about climate change. He got familiar got familiar with the science and learned that the consensus was that people were impacting the climate. He showed up to the next family gathering armed with the facts.

Eventually I realized that other people had family members like that that might find this useful resource as well, and so I published the website debunking climate misinformation.

The website was called Skeptical Science, and it changed his life.

Publishing the debunkings and just beginning public engagement on the issue of climate change really set me down the road of learning more about how to debunk misinformation, eventually leading me to do a PhD in cognitive science and really study in depth the psychology of science denial.

Today, John is a professor at George Mason University studying misinformation and how to counter it. Over the last 10 years, John discovered a very effective way to fight science denial, something called inoculation theory.

Inoculation theory is a branch of psychological research dating back to the '50s, and it basically borrows the idea of vaccination and applies it to knowledge. If you expose people to a weakened form of misinformation, then that builds up their immunity, their resistance, so that when they encounter actual misinformation out in the real world, they're less likely to be influenced.

So what does this tool for fighting climate change denial have to do with the pandemic?

In my research, I also found that inoculating people against the techniques of denial in one topic also inoculates them against the same techniques in other topics. Inoculating people against climate denial can inoculate them against vaccine misinformation or COVID misinformation or evolution misinformation.

Combating misinformation has become more important than ever during the pandemic. The novel coronavirus, social media, and a polarized political environment created something public health experts have dubbed an infodemic, a flood of misleading information and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and the public response to it. In this episode of Epidemic, we're going to hear more about the techniques Jon developed to fight misinformation and how he's applying it to COVID. We'll hear from experts how misinformation spreads online.

I started getting quite a lot of recommendations into groups that were not anti-vaccine, but that were highly conspiratorial and sometimes actually, you know, sort of increasingly violent.

Learn how to spot misinformation.

There's really just 5 main techniques that you need to be aware of.

And hear what needs to change to stop misinformation before it causes serious harm.

So we focus on a post and say, is that true or false? Should it be labeled or taken down? And we've been so focused on these individual atoms that we failed to see the way that those individual atoms create these larger narratives.

Today on Epidemic, How to stop an infodemic. Claire Wardle is the U.S. director of First Draft.

We're a nonprofit that helps organizations tackle the challenges of misinformation.

Since the pandemic started, her organization has been focused on coronavirus and more recently, vaccine misinformation. I know firsthand from my time working in HIV and later as an Ebola aid worker, that misinformation and conspiracy theories are not new when it comes to public health. But Claire says misinformation in the time of COVID is spreading like never before.

So back in March, we'd see the same rumors popping up in a WhatsApp group in Mexico City, and then we'd see it pop up in Perth in Australia, and then in Delhi in India. And the interconnected nature of those rumors and how this was spreading, I'd never seen anything like that before in an era of social networks. So we've had other health emergencies where rumors have been a serious problem, but we didn't have the technology, which meant those same rumors were crossing borders in seconds.

Social media and closed messaging apps like WhatsApp have created an environment where misinformation can spread like wildfire. So the World Health Organization, or WHO, asked First Draft to help combat this COVID infodemic.

The WHO, right at the beginning of the pandemic, very clearly identified that this wasn't just a problem with the virus, So on one hand, you've got all of these rumors and falsehoods spreading in your family WhatsApp groups and other spaces. But also when I go to try and find information about vaccines or masks or airborne transmission, there's all sorts of people out there trying to give me information and I'm overwhelmed because not all of it is consistent. So that's the challenge with infodemics is too much information and not knowing who to trust.

And the stakes are high. First Draft did a case study of how misinformation about a polio vaccination program in Pakistan snowballed with deadly results. In 2009, a fake video showed children in a hospital who were allegedly sick because of the polio vaccine. The video spread quickly on social media, and even local news picked up the story.

Some fake videos started circulating, which if you watch the whole video, it's quite clearly staged. But most people didn't even click on the link. They just saw the screengrab. And in over 3 days, all of a sudden, there was this huge response and people started pulling their children out of vaccination programs. Then they started going to health centers, burning them down. A couple of health practitioners lost their lives. And it was a reminder of how quickly we can have misinformation crises. And what we saw in that moment was that government officials, UNICEF, other influencers and newsrooms, they didn't know how to respond quickly enough. They didn't know how to damp down those rumors. And their absence of anything meant that the rumor just took off and caused real, real harm.

Since then, Claire's organization has worked with the WHO to train infodemic managers. These people help local governments around the world proactively respond to rumors like the one in Pakistan before they get out of control. But this kind of misinformation happens in the United States too. Renee DiResta knows about it firsthand.

Sure, so my name's Renee DiResta, and I'm the research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.

In 2015, Renee helped start a parent-led community called Vaccinate California. The organization supported SB 277, a bill which is now California law that requires all children to get school immunizations. Regardless of personal beliefs. Renee saw how misinformation spreads while she was volunteering with the group.

So when I was looking at anti-vaccine content in 2015, I joined a bunch of anti-vaccine groups, and I wanted to try to understand what those communities were like, what they saw, what they were talking about.

Renee says she never made comments in these groups. She just read what others were posting in them.

What started to be much more interesting than the content itself or any of the anti-vaccine groups or, you know, pages themselves was actually the way in which the recommendation engines behaved when I had communicated that I was interested in this content.

Once Facebook's algorithm saw she was in an anti-vaccine group, it started to suggest she join other conspiratorial groups.

And there was one that pushed to me yesterday called Viruses Are Not Contagious. Which sort of disputes the very foundational science by which we understand, you know, how diseases are transmitted.

She started to get recommendations for things like flat earth groups, for example. But the more groups she joined, the more far out and even violent the groups became.

And so that dynamic was, was, was pretty troubling, the extent to which this content was being pushed at people as opposed to them proactively going and searching for it. This account never did any proactive searching for any of this. It was just being pushed it constantly because it had indicated an interest in a wholly unrelated conspiratorial concept.

Another contributor to the spread of misinformation is something called a data void. When there's a new topic in the news, people start searching for that term online or in social media.

And what pops up is not always the most reliable information. It's sort of the content that got there for that term first.

Many search engines rely on the wisdom of the crowd for their results. Basically, the more people reference or link to a specific source gets interpreted as a signal that that's where to find the best or most accurate information. But for these new terms, things like coronavirus back in March, there's relatively little out there. That's the data void.

So the voids are these spaces where there's just not enough content, not enough reputable content to provide people with the information they're looking for. And so unscrupulous actors Oftentimes spammers, but occasionally people with a political agenda as well, will attempt to kind of squat on these keywords and gain pride of place in search results.

Renee saw a version of this when she studied the way anti-vaccine advocates used Twitter.

One of the things that we would see as we examined the Twitter conversation around the hashtag for the bill is that a very, very small fraction of a percent of the participants in the conversation were producing more than half of the content in the hashtag. So very, very small number of accounts producing huge amounts of content and propaganda related to the bill. So if you were to go search for it, that's what you would see.

This kind of misinformation is really hard to fight once it's in the world. But what if there was a way to protect people from this kind of misinformation before they share it? We'll circle back to John Cook's research into how people can get inoculated against misinformation after the break. Inoculation theory applies many of the same lessons from vaccination to misinformation.

I mean, I'm reluctant to use the word cure, but to change a denier's mind, we can reduce their influence and stop misinformation from spreading if we inoculate. And theoretically, if we can inoculate enough of the public, if critical thinking can become widespread enough then you can eradicate certain aspects of misinformation, achieve herd immunity.

So how does this work?

An inoculating message basically consists of two things. Firstly, warning people of the threat that they might be misled, and then secondly, counterarguments explaining how the misinformation misleads.

One of the more common techniques used to spread misinformation is fake experts.

And the example I used was the tobacco industry. In a nationwide survey, doctors in all branches of medicine were asked, "What cigarette do you smoke, doctor?" They used to use fake experts back in the '50s, in the mid-20th century. And according to this nationwide survey, more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette. And they would run these newspaper ads showing tens of thousands of doctors endorsing a particular brand of cigarettes. Or reassuring us that smoking soothes the throat and wasn't harmful to our health. Try Camels yourself, the cigarette so many doctors enjoy.

As John explained how cigarette companies were using fake experts to sell their products, he showed the same group a piece of climate denial misinformation that also used fake experts.

Climate misinformation, which is most effective with political conservatives, was completely neutralized, as well as with political liberals, across the political spectrum. The misinformation was neutralized. So if you explain the techniques that can be used to trick them, those techniques no longer are effective on them.

This is a powerful technique because it's effective across the political spectrum and for any kind of misinformation, but it requires critical thinking skills. John says a lot of people are never taught how to assess the merits of an argument in school. So John and others decided that they could develop a game to help students and adults learn these skills. They called it Cranky Uncle. It just came out in December for iOS and Android.

The main character in the game is a cartoon cranky uncle, and he basically mentors you on how to become a science-denying cranky uncle.

As the character teaches you his tricks, you're then asked to spot the logical fallacies in different examples.

So we test them on vaccination and evolution and flat-Earthism and climate change and just general everyday fallacy arguments. And their ability to spot those fallacies improves across all the different issues.

For the average listener, what would be maybe a cheat sheet of what they should be aware of so that they're not fooled by misinformation or conspiracy theories when they encounter them?

There's really just 5 main techniques that you need to be aware of: fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry-picking, and conspiracy theories.

The first one John already mentioned— fake experts.

A good example in the COVID realm is the Great Barrington Declaration. That was a petition of mostly non-experts and just a handful of actual experts, but they were, they were really the outliers in the medical community.

Next, logical fallacies.

Through the course of this year, the logical fallacy I seemed to see the most often was false equivalence.

Think about the debate in the summer over whether or not to reopen schools in the United States.

The argument was, well, Germany and France are opening their schools, so why shouldn't we? But the thing was, at that time, Germany and France had crushed the curve and their COVID cases was down to very low levels while the US levels were extremely high, which meant that you really couldn't compare the two.

Another one that's very common with vaccines is impossible expectations.

We see people arguing that the vaccine should be 100% safe before we use it, but nothing is ever 100% safe. It's an impossible expectation.

And the risks that are there with vaccines are being mitigated and managed John says many of the extreme examples cited with vaccines is a form of cherry-picking, highlighting an outlier case to sow doubt. This is often used to attribute a serious ailment like paralysis, for example, to a vaccine.

And these kind of stories can really tug at the heartstrings, but they are firstly anecdotal, and secondly, they commit the fallacy of confusing correlation with causation. Thinking that just because two things happen close to each other, one must have caused the other. The last thing is conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theories are always associated with science denial. And there's also the 5G conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by 5G, just because they both happened at the same time. I mean, 5G came in 2019 and COVID-19 also came in 2019. And that logic is like arguing that Baby Yoda came in 2019. Well, maybe he created COVID-19 as well. So just because two things happen at the same time, again, doesn't mean that one caused the other.

These are important things to be able to identify for any citizen in a democracy. But inoculating people against misinformation isn't enough. Science communicators need to change how they get out their message.

If I had to sum up all the psychological research into debunking in just six words, it would be, "Fight sticky myths with stickier facts." Myths are sticky, they grab people's attention and stay in their memories because they're simple, they evoke an emotional response, you know, using these concrete examples or anecdotes, and they're often in the form of a story. Science communicators or anyone trying to explain the facts to people should be looking at these traits, not the deceptive ones, but just the basic traits that make messages stickier and apply that to their facts.

Claire Wardle agrees.

Bad actors are really good at flooding the zone and creating all types of different memes, GIFs, videos, very, very, very visual. Those of us on the quality information side are really good at creating 87-page PDFs. We need to get much better at creating really emotional, engaging content.

Claire says the other missing piece is a community-driven narrative.

And I think those kind of misinformation experts who like to think that if we just push out the right messages on Facebook, we'll be okay, completely fails to understand that this, in terms of countering rumors and misinformation, it has to be at the community level and it has to be about working with the community to think about the most effective messages, the most effective formats.

What does that kind of community engagement look like more concretely?

So it's about connecting with community organizations, it's connecting with faith leaders, it's thinking about finding ways to bring the community into feeling that they're part of the response.

This is hard work. It requires a lot of patience and empathy, and right now those are both in short supply.

The failure to listen to each other means that we're failing to understand why people are susceptible to these rumors and these conspiracies. This is about co-creating messages with different communities that are culturally relevant and specific and empathetic. And I think in a country like just the US, you know, understanding how these conversations, messages have to be shaped with the communities themselves is critical. So at the moment, the conversations are pretty patronizing, patriarchal, this belief that audiences are passive. I find it deeply troubling. And until we change that mindset, I don't think we're going to get very far.

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