[LUM#15] The Fake News Epidemic
Social media, blogs, websites… Staying informed about the COVID-19 pandemic has never been easier—or more complicated. A team of researchers has examined the various pieces of information circulating in Africa since the start of the pandemic and is warning of the health risks they pose.
Not quite news, not quite fake news—that’s“infox.”“Usually defined as information whose source is not explicit and which is not validated by an institution, most often disseminated via social media and networks in the form of short videos, texts, or simple images, sometimes accompanied by comments,” explains Alice Desclaux, a health anthropologist at the TransVIHMI* laboratory. Rarely entirely accurate or entirely false,“it can also involve information that takes on a misleading meaning when taken out of context, hasty generalizations, or subjective interpretations presented as facts,” the researcher explains.
Thousands of these fake news stories have been circulating since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in Africa, where there are sometimes as many cell phones as there are people and where “social media plays a huge role. WhatsApp is, in fact, the most widely used messaging app in French-speaking Africa,” notes the anthropologist. Why so much misinformation?“In a crisis situation, its spread may be driven by the desire to share one’s interpretation of an event amid a climate of anxiety, to disseminate one’s ideas about the pandemic, or to publicize a preventive measure or ‘the’ treatment that everyone is hoping for.”
Infodemic
Faced with this information epidemic—or “infodemic,” as the WHO calls it—pandemic response efforts have sought to identify fake news in order to debunk it and provide the public with accurate information.“To do this, we first had to understand the context, meaning, and scope of this fake news; this is one of the objectives of the CORAF research project (coronavirus-Africa), part of the ARIACOV program,” explains Alice Desclaux.
The researchers first described the impact of misinformation regarding chloroquine, illustrating the potential effects of the global spread of information via social media in Africa. In Cameroon and in all the countries surveyed, demand for chloroquine rose in pharmacies following the announcement of the first COVID-19 case.“Furthermore, people quickly stocked up on chloroquine on the informal market, buying derivatives with varying compositions, very different from the hydroxychloroquine promoted by some doctors to treat COVID-19,”says Alice Desclaux.
A trade that is not without risk, where expired or counterfeit products circulate. “We have alerted health authorities to the risk of self-medication with chloroquine derivatives, which are perceived as a miracle drug.”The anthropologist highlights a situation where the risk posed by medications can compound the risk of infection and go“under the radar” during a health crisis.
Recommendations
For researchers, the “textbook case” of chloroquine shows that misinformation can have concrete, harmful effects on the health of populations in African countries. “The rapid circulation of medical information—which, in addition to crossing continents, moves from an academic sphere where knowledge is strictly codified to the vast, uncontrolled realm of the media and digital networks—poses a real challenge to public health authorities, and not just in Africa,” concludes Alice Desclaux. This is, in fact, one of her recommendations: that scientifically accurate and ethically acceptable medical information be more widely promoted in global media and on social media.
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