AS GOVERNMENTS battle to contain the transmission of , they have also struggled to stymie the spread of related online misinformation and vitriol.
The has resulted in the rapid propagation of conspiracy theories that pose a risk to public health, a surge in online anti-Asian hate speech and a proliferation of covid-19 scams.
Much of the misinformation shared online about coronavirus is being disseminated by sites that have peddled conspiracy theories about other topics, such as vaccines and the 9/11 attacks, says John Gregory at , a firm that rates the trustworthiness of news and information sites. The firm first noticed a rise in covid-19 misinformation in the last week of January, as the virus began to be widely covered in news reports.
Advertisement
“The majority of the sites we’ve identified for sharing misinformation about the coronavirus and the pandemic are sites we had already rated as unreliable,” says Gregory.
In Europe, the firm identified it deemed “super-spreaders” of coronavirus misinformation, which together had a following of more than 13 million users. “The volume is unprecedented,” says Gregory.
Some sites are using covid-19 as a new way to spread stories, says Gregory. For example, conspiracy sites that had falsely claimed that 5G signals cause cancer have since pivoted to baselessly linking 5G to the pandemic.
In the UK, Kate Daunt at Cardiff University and her colleagues surveyed more than 700 people between 21 March and 5 April, and found that 51 per cent of respondents had seen coronavirus misinformation in the past month.
Among the group who reported they hadn’t seen any fake news about covid-19, the researchers found that 41 per cent never fact‑check news stories before sharing them. “These individuals are less information aware and may be seeing disinformation without realising it,” says Daunt.
It isn’t just fake news that is being spread online. Srijan Kumar at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and his colleagues the growth in anti-Asian hate speech on Twitter, analysing nearly 31 million tweets related to covid-19.
They defined anti-Asian hate speech as any tweet that was abusive or derogatory towards an individual or groups of Asian people, or that blamed them for the creation, spread or misrepresentation of covid-19.
The team identified roughly 3 per cent – or 891,000 tweets – as hateful, and 10 per cent of these were posted by bots. It also found that around 200,000 tweets were counter-hateful, meaning they actively criticised racism and hate speech, or supported or defended Asian people.
Hate speech, like the virus, seems to be contagious. Even taking into account the fact that people tend to follow others with similar views, users who saw anti‑Asian hate speech tweeted by someone they followed were five times more likely to then tweet hateful content themselves.
Conversely, the researchers found that counter-hateful tweets discouraged others from tweeting hateful messages. This suggests that social media platforms should take measures to reduce users’ exposure to hateful content, says Kumar. “This is not just about online hate speech,” he says. “It is also about how people get affected in the real world.”
Scams on the rise
The coronavirus pandemic has also led to an uptick in scams. In April, UK communications regulator of calls and texts from scammers posing as the government, public health agencies and even Ofcom itself.
Text messages often mimic official wording, such as seeking money through fake fines for allegedly breaching lockdown rules. Callers have posed as health workers or , offering tests and treatments.
As of 29 May, nearly £4.7 million had been lost in coronavirus scams nationally, and more than 2000 people defrauded, according to ActionFraud, the UK’s reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime. It has also received more than 11,200 reports of coronavirus-related phishing emails, which seek to steal an unwitting user’s personal information.
The UK National Cyber Security Centre has noted a rise in scam websites selling fake testing kits, face masks and vaccines. It launched a for suspicious emails on 21 April, receiving more than 600,000 in just over five weeks.
Cybercriminals are taking advantage of people’s health fears, says Jake Moore at internet security firm ESET. “In that panic, [people] are giving away far too much information that they normally would probably think twice about,” he says.
Moore says that coronavirus-related scams have followed trends in the news. A current concern relates to those around the UK’s contact-tracing app, in which people receive fake texts or emails from addresses only slightly different to official ones. “Attackers are jumping on this and having a field day,” he says.
