COVID-19: How can we communicate risk in a post-truth world?
On 26 October 2020, Vian Bakir gave a talk titled 'COVID-19: How can we communicate risk in a post-truth world?' to XXXII Meeting of Philosophy & Theory of Human Sciences, Philosophy Department, at the renowned Unesp/Brazil (campus Marília/Sao Paulo).
Her talk discusses the scale and character of COVID-19 false information, and considers a range of coercive and non-coercive multi-stakeholder solutions available to solve the ‘wicked problem’ of eliminating the spread and impact of false information on COVID-19.
Vian states that she is pessimistic that this sort of false information can be quashed globally, not least because big data studies find that: deception spreads further and faster than truth on social media; emotion online is contagious; and emotive disinformation developed in online echo chambers also infects mainstream news.
While we can, and should, do what we can - such as advancing solutions that improve digital literacy, that improve the health of a pluralistic news ecology, that defund online sites that profit from disinformation, and that pressurise dominant social media platforms to promote real news and downgrade fake news web sites, ultimately one of the biggest drivers of online deception are professional persuaders, public relations companies and politicians.
Vian concludes:
"As long as professional persuaders and politicians aided by PR companies seek to mislead and deceive, then disinformation will always be a democratic challenge. As long as social media companies are given free reign to self-regulate their platforms as they see fit, and as long as people keep using these platforms, especially in preference to news outlets, then emotive disinformation will continue to flourish. "
This is a huge problem in public health emergencies beset by uncertainty - like the COVID-19 pandemic. And it is a huge problem in democracies - where you want both an engaged/mobilised citizen, but also an informed one.
Vian’s talk is 41 mins into this video.