Disinformation has become a real scourge in our societies connected fuel to social media. It would also have contributed to the death of thousands of Canadians during the pandemic. And this toxic phenomenon, which has taken on an unprecedented scale in recent years, is far from running out of steam, say the experts who seek to thwart it.
Several researchers discussed this issue at the Grande Bibliothèque on Thursday, as part of the symposium Fighting misinformation in 2023 organized by the collective LaSciencedAbord.
Thanks to the Internet, we are overwhelmed by a mass of information like never before. However, an increasing number of them are erroneous or misleading; they fool citizens and sometimes even threaten their health and life.
“Misinformation kills people. This claim seems exaggerated, but it is not. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has noted that the spread of misinformation contributes to the erosion of life expectancy in this country. And according to a recently released report by the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) Expert Panel, misinformation targeting COVID-19 has resulted in the deaths of 2,800 Canadians during the pandemic. This is an extremely important issue that needs to be addressed,” said Professor Timothy Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Alberta, who was the one of the speakers at the symposium.
Misinformation has unquestionably had an impact on vaccination rates due to the spread of clearly false information — “vaccine kills people”, “vaccines induce autism”, “mRNA vaccines will change your DNA —, he gives as an example. It also contributes to the use of unproven therapies for a host of diseases, such as COVID-19 and cancer, laments the professor.
An ideological position
Mr. Caulfield observed in particular that misinformation is increasingly equated with ideological positions. “At the start of COVID, Canadians were more united, they celebrated public health professionals, who were considered heroes. Then, little by little, ideological positions became preponderant,” he notes.
Marie-Ève Carignan, professor in the communication department at the Université de Sherbrooke and co-holder of the UNESCO chair in the prevention of radicalization and violent extremism, points out that US President Donald Trump has undermined public trust. towards the traditional media by accusing them of conveying fake news (fake news), “which are a form of disinformation mimicking the journalistic format, but which are produced by individuals who often have hidden political, economic or other interests”.
In Quebec, disinformation is widely shared on social networks by influencers who have “a prior ideology, which can be political or sometimes linked to parascience,” she says.
“Some have monetary pursuits or interests in areas like alternative or natural medicine. Several “say they want to fight a government dictatorship or the lies that are conveyed in our society”. They “generally have a hidden interest” and they adopt “a sometimes conspiratorial discourse”, specifies the researcher.
“Some conspiratorial leaders present themselves as journalists when they are not, in fact, because they do not adhere to any journalistic ethics”, she underlines. “They pretend to be journalists and have a reliable news site that meets professional standards of journalism when in fact they are sites that seek to confirm their own ideological biases,” said Ms.me Carignan while specifying that Quebec is full of “alternative media or pseudo-media”, “in speeches that can sometimes be described as very conspiratorial and which have a great influence”.
echo chambers
In Quebec, we are greatly influenced by French-speaking disinformation, which also comes from France and Belgium, and which is itself influenced by what is being done in the United States, points out Ms.me Carignan.
The firm NewsGuard published last December a list of the most influential French-speaking disinformation sites in 2022. Epochtimes.fr, the French version ofEpoch Times, a right-wing media network opposed to the Chinese communist government, topped the list. It is followed by FranceSoir.fr, the site of a former major French daily newspaper, which had its status as a “political and general information” site withdrawn after publishing false information on COVID-19, vaccines and the war in Ukraine.
“The problem is that these sites give each other a lot of visibility. Often, leaders from here are invited to French networks and vice versa, and this helps to make them shine,” emphasizes the researcher.
Social media algorithms are also a big contributor to the spread of false, misleading or baseless information that forms disinformation, experts note. These algorithms search for and recommend eye-catching content that matches users’ interests and what they usually consult.
Algorithms thus act as “echo chambers”, “where people are always confronted with information that echoes their beliefs and reinforces them”, explains Ms.me Carignan.
Mr. Caulfield has also noted that this phenomenon means that a person who believes in one conspiracy theory — that the war in Ukraine is staged, for example — will also often believe in others, such as those linked at QAnon. “And when those ideologies are part of the person’s worldview, they’re also part of how they identify themselves. It then becomes more difficult to change that person’s way of thinking. We first observed this phenomenon in the United States and now we see it more and more in Canada,” says the researcher.
Alessandro Marcon, a research associate at the University of Alberta’s Health Law Institute, has discovered the existence of Twitter accounts that don’t belong to real people, but to computer bots — software programmed to automatically perform tasks without human intervention. He and his colleagues found that most of these accounts were promoting hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic, when scientific studies had shown the drug to be ineffective against COVID-19.
“There were a lot of these accounts that had been created to promote [de ce médicament] and conspiracy theories in very emotional tweets. On the other hand, there were very few, if any, who were critical of him,” he explains.
How to act?
These different experts offer various avenues for combating misinformation. Professor Caulfield believes in particular that it will be necessary to intervene at the level of social media, “which have a large share of responsibility” in the current situation, and that it will also be necessary to acquire “regulatory tools”.
Professor Carignan insists on the importance of popularizing more — and better — science. In particular, we must focus on education, explain how the scientific process works, explain the journalistic approach so that the public can make the difference between a text produced by a journalist and that of an influencer, explain how media platforms work social and their algorithms, explain what a dictatorship or an authoritarian system is, she argues.
“And we shouldn’t just go to young people, because the data shows us that those who are most affected by disinformation and conspiracy are people aged 18 to 55,” says the researcher.