FRIDAY, March 13, shortly after 1:30 p.m., the cell phone recently purchased through TheJournal.ie beeped and lit up with its first WhatsApp message containing fake news from a reader.
Seconds later, one came.
Then another one.
And another.
Readers shared the messages they got from friends and family about the coronavirus, seeking confirmation as to whether what they were reading was true.
Ireland then wobbles in the pandemic. There were 43 cases and the first death was shown two days earlier. The Taoiseach at the time, Leo Varadkar, had delivered his dramatic speech in Washington just over 24 hours earlier, the last schools, universities and day care centers and told others to paint from home.
But while all this happens, another story of coronavirus unfolds beneath the surface, almost entirely in WhatsApp messages.
“The infodemic, like WHO, is a bit like a shadow that follows the pandemic around the world,” says Alastair Reid, editor-in-chief of First Draft, an organization that tracks and combats misinformation.
“As the occasions and new developments unfold, the wrong data is followed by because other people are so hungry for data about it.”
The history of coronavirus in Ireland cannot be told without also mentioning the amount of incorrect information that has been shared in this regard, i.e. the first six weeks of the pandemic and the damage it has caused.
Until then, Ireland had low degrees of incorrect information to other countries, with very few actors of the poor religion sharing it, either in the mainstream or more specialized media.
But the coronavirus has replaced all that. Even before the first case was shown on February 29, many fake stories were shared through friends, families and groups.
The messages claimed that a complete closure was about to begin, that the army patrolled the streets, that the HSE was advising others to buy food. Others have made statements about questionable remedies and preventive measures (no, drinking hot water would possibly not prevent you from contracting a coronavirus) and the (false) 5G link to the disease, which could cause harm to others who took the messages on board. .
It’s “pretty unequivocal” to the example of incorrect information that’s been noticed on a topic, Says Reid.
The important thing about the huge volumes of incorrect information that have spread about coronavirus in recent months is whether Ireland can return to its previous levels of fake news, or whether it has now arrived to stay.
The First Wave: Anxiety
The first wave of incorrect information began spreading on WhatsApp last February and lasted until April, warning of secret bodies in the country’s hospitals and the government that hides secrets from the public.
“I get text messages that say Hospital X is closed. The coronavirus is here.” That’s not true,” the then health minister Simon Harris told RT Radio One on 28 February, a day before the first case shown in Ireland.
All of these messages had one in common: they addressed people’s anxieties.
“There were a lot of things we didn’t know,” says Jules Darmain, a researcher who worked with the International Data Verification Network to collect data on coronavirus as a component of a global alliance that began last January.
“We didn’t know how fatal the disease was. We didn’t know, and we still don’t know, how to fix it. So it creates a data gap, and rumors and false data fill that gap.”
One of the most popular messages, which was sent to TheJournal.ie almost a hundred times in a day, claimed to have data from a garda that was a friend of the original sender.
He struck many of the tropes of this wave: he argued an authorized source. It contained data that, he said, had access to the public. He cautioned against the advent of excessive measures.
Another variant read: “I won a friend of the Guard. A Dublin hotel has closed. Cases in Mater, Vincents, Beaumont … the rupture of existing media … it will soon erupte … My brother’s.
The maximum intent of these messages was unlikely to be malicious.
“For many people, the concept is what harm it can do to the percentage of this information,” Darmain says.
Darmain notes that many families use WhatsApp as a way to stay in touch, which has led to sharing messages within them because “other people were looking for other people they love to learn this information.”
Other messages sent warned of an imminent closure, with the army able to patrol the streets to make sure they met.
The most popular message of the moment at the time, according to an investigation of the heaps of messages sent to the WhatsApp number of TheJournal.ie, an audio message shared on WhatsApp.
In the 60-second clip, a guy uses terms that are so realistic for a Lego listener, but they point out that the message is false for the military.
“Well guys, you just got the message there, we have to be at the barracks on Monday at 6:00,” the message said, which circulated widely on the weekend of March 14 and 15.
“A Taoiseach will announce at 8:00 a.m. That the country is in a red state emergency … so from 8 a.m. we’ll be patrolling Dublin, making sure other people are locked up, making sure there’s no one out there.”
The Defense Forces have used their popular social media platforms to correct facts and disseminate information through official sources. He also used a Military.ie member domain to inform enlisted staff of what was going on.
“We had to save a vacuum from being filled with misinformation,” a Defence Forces spokesman told TheJournal.
“We have used our social media platforms as a data source that other people can access.”
However, it is much more complicated to disseminate the right data than to disseminate fake data.
Facebook had been seen as the cradle of fake stories in Ireland, but one of the biggest tweaks in this is the scope of fake messages shared on WhatsApp, which does not have a central means of spreading accurate information.
“When you look at more incorrect information and incorrect conspiracy information, Facebook teams are much more frequent because that’s where you communicate and interact with other people you don’t know and shared reviews with,” Darmain says.
“While for fitness forums, for example, the position is on WhatsApp.”
WhatsApp makes it very unlikely to track how a message was shared or viewed, but to give a concept of scale: TheJournal.ie set up a phone number on March 13th so that other people can simply transmit the questionable messages they had sent them. so we can see them.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, WhatsApp has brought new tactics to prevent it from spreading false information. Messages can only be forwarded a maximum of five times, for example.
However, this can be a pain-limiting exercise. And by allowing others to think that things were deliberately hidden from them, he paved the way for the next wave of misinformation.
The Wave: Distrust of the authorities
The current wave of misinformation, founded on distrust of establishments and authorities, began in April and continues.
“As we learned more about coronavirus, it’s clearer that it’s a pandemic that affects virtually every single country, and then [we started to see] more conspiratorial messages about things that already existed like 5G or anti-vaccination,” Darmain says.
She says other people felt they were “being guided.”
“It’s more about not accepting as true the data you’re given than anxiety about the disease. Of course, anxiety plays a role in that, but if you don’t accept as true what the media tells you or what the government is telling you, you’re probably more susceptible to unfounded theories like 5G.”
This misdata went from WhatsApp to Facebook where it discovered a position in some cases on pages and computers that had emerged to percentage data on the pandemic. For registration, the volume of fake messages in percentage on WhatsApp, and sent on the phone of TheJournal.ie, has been greatly reduced.
Instead, the topics on Facebook have expanded to come with locals (5G theories, the government seeks to make a vaccine mandatory – non-existent – Covid-19) and international: Bill Gates brought before the International Criminal Court for crimes opposed to humanity. has been widely shared on Facebook in Ireland and other European countries.
These articles speak of the distrust of governments, billionaires, monetary establishments and fitness authorities, and manage to blame them for their role in the pandemic.
Plandemic’s widely shared video stated that vaccines were a rewarding exercise before being eliminated, such as an interview with Dolores Cahill, a UCD academic, in which she said that blocking is not mandatory to prevent the spread of the virus.
This article, widely shared in Ireland and several other countries in May, is a mixture of these theories.
He claims that WHO had a “law” that prevented Italy from wearing down autopsies, but that secret autopsies had revealed that “covid is a virus, but a bacterium.” He says aspirin and a coagulant are effective treatments and that fans and extensive care equipment were needed to treat the deadly disease.
(In TheJournal.ie’s fact review of this statement, TCD virologist Dr. Kim Roberts said, “It’s a virus. We saw it, sequenced it [and] tested it with microscopes”).
This type of conspiracy, along with the lead roles of Jeffrey Epstein, Anthony Fauci, Bill and Melinda Gates, George Soros and WHO, would be shared across a small number of other people on Irish Facebook pages. However, the pandemic has replaced the game and the volume of messages, and the reaction to them has increased.
Facebook research shows that there have been 76,302 interactions, whether reactions, comments or actions, about posts about Bill Gates on Irish Facebook pages between March and now, according to CrowdTangle social metrics.
For it was last year, there were just over 10,000, and a message that accurately represented part of one’s interactions was a joke that recommended the exam to outgoing Cert students.
The intentions behind those messages are smarter than in the first wave. “[With] 5G, this has been driven a lot through what we can collect across Russia in particular, or through elements in Russia,” MEP Billy Kelleher said at a webinar organized through TheJournal.ie and the European Parliament recently.
“It has been used as a tactic to stop economies from the Covid crisis and undermine confidence in governments in particular.”
If the first wave of stories is misleading but it is imaginable to determine the facts, this wave of moments is almost unimaginable. Being able to see the stories helped stop the tide with some stories. In that he hit near you, a message shared on WhatsApp and Twitter on May 14 said TheJournal.ie was closing.
The message was verified, posted, and the message stopped almost immediately.
But for auditors, conspiracy theories are different: how do we demystify the claim that Bill Gates secretly runs a paedophile network and created the pandemic to prevent the police from approaching him?
Are you staying?
The question for Ireland is whether the country will return to its last low degrees of misinformation, or whether the pandemic has marked a tipping point and whether fake news is now something we hope to have to navigate through social media and messaging apps.
“Today, there are fewer lies circulating around Covid-19, even if the pandemic has not stopped.
“But in many countries, the data cycle has been replaced for a variety of reasons. In Western Europe, this is because there are fewer cases. In the United States, that’s because the black lives matter protests and motion have taken more transmission time, basically. “
However, he cautions that he opposes the continued dissemination of conspiracy theories. Some Facebook pages configured with percentage data about the coronavirus have shared erroneous data on other topics, such as 5G or how a vaccine works.
In recent weeks, there have been a significant number of Facebook posts on some of those pages that have focused on how the pandemic is using money in society, forcing others to use cards and phones to pay for things, meaning they can be seamlessly tracked through banks and government.
It was also reported that, given that other people got much of their news from social media giants about the pandemic, this may have created the hope that they would get long-term “real” news from those unverified sources.
“It’s hard to measure the number of other people who buy conspiracy theories or become propagators,” darmain says.
“But you know, in some countries there was a major movement against vaccines before Covid-19 and, depending on how the vaccine discovery develops, there could be more feeling against vaccines. I don’t think there’s any less.
“My is that the resistance movement opposed to vaccines will be greater than it already was.”
Until 2016, deep forgery, Brexit and Trump, Ireland saw incorrect information in the same way or at the same point as other jurisdictions.
But since the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed, TheJournal.ie FactCheck has discredited or reviewed 75 coronavirus claims. Through this work, we have been able to track the effect of the pandemic on Ireland’s vulnerability and its dating with false information.
In this series, we’ll look at some of the most infamous stories: who are they and what effect they had on the population? We looked at the environment and the computer that allowed messages to propagate; his R number is as scary as Covid-19’s.
This new coronavirus would possibly not be with us forever, but the wrong information may also be one of its fatal aftermath.
So now we ask: Does Ireland have forever? Watch the full series here.
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