This text is taken from Courrier de l’économie. To subscribe, click here.
The spread of false information has a cost, including an economic one.
Faced with the most serious global pandemic for a century, the director general of the World Health Organization had issued this cry of alarm in the winter of 2020: “We are not just fighting an epidemic; we are also fighting an infodemic. False information spreads faster and easier than this virus, and it is just as dangerous. »
The phenomenon has been in the news for several years now, but has been the subject of relatively few scientific studies on its socio-economic impacts for the moment. A group of experts from the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) has looked into the question, trying in particular to estimate the economic cost, during the COVID-19 pandemic, of what it calls “misinformation” and which covers “claims that are false or misleading and inadvertently disseminated (misinformation) or deliberately created or disseminated (disinformation)”.
In a report titled fault lines and recently unveiled, these experts estimate that the belief that COVID-19 was “a hoax or an exaggeration” caused 2.35 million Canadians to delay or refuse their vaccination between March and November 2021. This had the consequences to increase the number of infections by 22% (+200,000), the number of hospitalizations by 28% (+13,000) and the number of deaths by 35% (+2,300) in Canada during this 9-month period alone.
It also added $300 million (+40%) to the total cost of hospitalization and intensive care stays. Although already high, this bill is only a conservative and partial estimate of the problem since it does not take into account “doctor billing, outpatient costs, time away from work, treatment costs from long-lasting COVID, productivity losses due to premature death, or general societal costs,” the researchers explain. All of these factors have not affected Canadians equally, they continue, with the virus, job losses and reduced work hours having disproportionately hit low-income and racialized people.
Complex but real influence
Misinformation has a complex, often indirect, and not always easy to pinpoint, influence on the course of events, observe the authors of the CAC report. Its damage is no less real and serious, including in economic terms. By clouding our understanding of the potential consequences of our personal and collective choices, and by fueling social discord and political polarization, it hampers our ability to tackle the many common challenges we face, such as climate change, disease, environmental degradation, inequality, threats to democracy and wars, they lament.
Examples are not lacking. By casting doubt on the science of climate change and claiming, falsely, that the carbon tax in Canada was a “job killer”, misinformation has contributed to delaying the fight against a phenomenon that should reduce the domestic product world crude from 11% to 14% by 2050.
Fake news has always existed, experts admit, but its distribution has exploded with the appearance of social media, whose income relies on the mobilization of its users. The creators of disinformation have understood this and use these platforms as formidable means of dissemination by exploiting the cognitive biases of consumers. Misinformation is also “increasingly used as a weapon for political ends, feeding on and contributing to political polarization.”
The fight against this phenomenon will be long and complex, warns the CAC report. It will have to go through the dissemination of accurate scientific information presented “in an honest, understandable way and by trusted messengers”. Reliable fact-checking and clear labeling of the presence of misinformation could also be done online. In addition, the public must be educated, “especially in media and scientific matters and on the techniques used to disseminate misinformation”.