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Doctors are exasperated by the patience of false and misleading claims about the virus.
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By Tiffany Hsu
Almost 3 years after the pandemic, Covid-19 remains stubbornly persistent. The same goes for incorrect information about the virus.
As covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in some parts of the country, myths and misleading narratives continue to evolve and spread, infuriating overburdened doctors and avoiding content moderators.
It started in 2020 when rumors casting doubt on lifestyles or the severity of covid temporarily evolved into outlandish claims about the harmful generation lurking in masks and intentional miracle cures for unproven drugs like ivermectin. The vaccine’s rollout last year fueled another wave of unfounded alarm bells. Now, in addition to all the claims still circulating, there are conspiracy theories about the long-term effects of treatments, according to the researchers.
Ideas continue to thrive on social media platforms, and the steady barrage that has been accumulating for years has made it increasingly difficult to spread accurate advice, according to disinformation researchers. Persistent risks of Covid and susceptible to other destructive medical content.
“It’s simple that incorrect information about fitness, adding about Covid, can still contribute to other people not getting vaccinated or creating stigma,” said Megan Marrelli, editorial director of Meedan, a nonprofit focused on virtual literacy and access to information. We know for sure that incorrect information about fitness contributes to the spread of genuine disease. “
Twitter is a specific fear for researchers. The company recently dismantled groups tasked with controlling harmful or erroneous data on the platform, stopped enforcing its Covid flawed data policy, and began basing some content moderation decisions on public polls released by its new owner and chief executive, billionaire Elon Musk.
From November 1 to December 5, Australian researchers collected more than half a million conspiratorial and misleading tweets in English about covid, terms such as “deep state,” “hoax,” and “biological weapon. “The tweets attracted more than 1. 6 million likes. and 580,000 retweets.
Investigators said the volume of poisonous substances exceeded last month with the release of a film that included unsubstantiated claims that covid vaccines triggered “the greatest orchestrated death in the history of the world. “
Naomi Smith, a sociologist at Federation University Australia who helped conduct the studies with Timothy Graham, a virtual media expert at Queensland University of Technology, said Twitter’s misinformation policies helped stifle anti-vaccine content that is not unusual on the platform in 2015 and 2016. From January 2020 to September 2022, Twitter suspended more than 11,000 accounts for violating its Covid misinformation policy.
Now, Dr. Smith said, the barriers are “falling in real time, which is attractive as educational and certainly scary. “
“Before Covid, other people who believed in wrong medical data were talking to each other, contained in their own little bubble, and you had to stop by and paint a little bit to locate that bubble,” he said. “But now you don’t have to do anything to locate this data: it’s presented in your feed along with any other kind of data. “
Several prominent Twitter accounts that had been suspended for spreading unsubstantiated claims about Covid have been reinstated in recent weeks, adding those of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. , and Robert Malone, a vaccine skeptic.
Musk himself used Twitter to weigh in on the pandemic, predicting in March 2020 that the U. S. would most likely be able to weigh in. The U. S. government has “about 0 new cases” through the end of April. (More than 100,000 positive tests were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. )Prevention in the last week of the month). This month, he focused on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who will soon step down as President Biden’s most sensible medical adviser and longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Musk said Dr. Fauci should be prosecuted.
Twitter responded to a request for comment. Other major social platforms, besides TikTok and YouTube, said last week that they remain committed to addressing misinformation about covid.
YouTube prohibits content (adding videos, comments, and links) about vaccines and Covid-19 that contradicts recommendations from the local fitness government or the World Health Organization. Facebook’s policy on Covid-19 content exceeds 4500 words. TikTok said it got rid of more than 250,000 videos with incorrect information about covid and worked with partners, such as its content advisory board, to expand its enforcement policies and strategies (Mr. Musk dissolved Twitter’s advisory board this month).
But the platforms have struggled with their Covid rules.
Newsguard, an organization that tracks incorrect information online, discovered this fall that typing “covid vaccine” on TikTok led it to recommend searchers for “covid vaccine injury” and “covid vaccine warning,” while the same Google question generated recommendations for “walking. ” -in the COVID vaccine” and “Types of COVID vaccines”. A TikTok search for “mRNA vaccine” turned up five videos containing false claims in the 10 most sensitive results, according to the researchers. TikTok said in a that its network’s rules “make it transparent that we do not allow destructive misinformation, adding incorrect medical information, and we will remove it from the platform. “
In previous years, other people were receiving medical advice from neighbors or searching for self-diagnosis through Google search, said Dr. Anish Agarwal, an emergency physician in Philadelphia. Now, years after the pandemic, he still receives patients who “crazy claims on social media that Covid vaccines will insert robots into his arms.
“We fight this every day,” said Dr. Agarwal, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and is associate director of Penn Medicine’s Center for Digital Health.
Online and offline discussions about coronavirus are changing, and patients recently asked him about booster shots and long covid, Dr. Agarwal said. It has a grant from the National Institutes of Health to examine covid-related behavior of other populations on social media. .
“In the future, understanding our behaviors and our mind around Covid will likely also shed light on how Americans interact with other fitness data on social media, how we can use social media to combat erroneous data,” he said.
Years of lies and rumors about covid have had a contagion effect, hurting public acceptance of all vaccines, Heidi J said. Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene.
“Covid rumors are not going away, they will be reused and adapted,” he said. “We can’t suppress that. No company can solve this problem. “
Some efforts to curb misinformation about the virus have run counter to First Amendment concerns.
A law California passed several months ago, and expected to take effect next month, would punish doctors for spreading false facts about covid vaccines. He already faces legal challenges from plaintiffs who call the settlement an unconstitutional violation of liberty. of expression. Tech corporations like Meta, Google, and Twitter have faced lawsuits this year from others who have been excluded from erroneous Covid data and claim corporations have overstepped the bounds of their content moderation efforts, while other lawsuits have accused platforms of failing to do so. enough to involve misleading narratives about the pandemic.
Dr. Graham Walker, an emergency physician in San Francisco, said rumors spreading online about the pandemic have taken him and many of his colleagues to social media in an attempt to correct inaccuracies. He posted several Twitter threads with over a hundred tests uploaded. tweets seeking to debunk incorrect information about the coronavirus.
But this year, he said he’s defeated by the flood of harmful content about a variety of medical issues. He left Twitter after the company abandoned its Covid misinformation policy.
“I don’t think it was a winning battle,” he said. It doesn’t look like a fair fight. “
Now, Dr. Walker said, he sees it as a “triple outbreak” of covid-19, R. S. V. , and the flu is bombarding the physical care system, reducing emergency room wait times in some hospitals from less than an hour to six hours. Misinformation about available remedies is, at least in part, responsible, he said.
“If we had a larger backlog of vaccines with the latest vaccines, we would probably have a smaller number of other people who are seriously ill with covid, and that will actually make a dent in the number of hospitalizations,” he said. “Honestly, at this point we’re going to take all the hits we can. “
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