Fighting the infodemic: Dispelling myths and creating clarity about COVID-19

Reading time: 4 minutes, 48 seconds.

Not long after the global coronavirus pandemic began, WHO coined the term ‘infodemic’ to refer to the glut of information about the virus, and the difficulty of sorting fact from fiction.  

In response to this, Internews’s project Rooted in Trust aims to “combat disinformation and create effective information exchange between public health agencies, humanitarian organizations and communities affected by COVID-19,” in various countries around the world. These initiatives use different channels and fora to track and respond to audience concerns, rumours and questions with reliable, evidence-based information. The programme has served over 4 million people in the last six months.

As part of the Displacement and Dialogue virtual conference from 5-16 October, the nonprofit media organization invited partners from three of the countries – Lebanon, the Philippines and Colombia – to discuss lessons learned, successes and trends related to the sharing of information in humanitarian contexts, in coronavirus times. Here I will summarise the event from an ICT4D perspective, focusing on the case studies presented from Lebanon and the Philippines.

The session began with Meghann Rhynard-Geil, Humanitarian Director, and Irene Scott, the Global Project Director of Internews, introducing the project. Scott explained how it came about as a response to the ‘infodemic’, and how journalists were often relying on secondary reporting, which can lead to misinformation. She went on to describe the project’s approach, which is to understand and listen to the local community – how and where people access information, who they trust, and where they like to share information. Every locality is different and has different challenges. She emphasized the importance of not making assumptions and to do a ‘reality check’ to ensure any advice given is localized and relevant; for example, the advice may be to wear a facemask, but what if people in that community don’t have access to facemasks?  

Scott then handed over to the speakers from the three partner organisations, who each summarized the project and challenges in their country. They were then asked a series of questions from the hosts, as well as questions submitted by the event participants. I will now summarise the lessons learned from the projects in Lebanon and the Philippines.

Lebanon

Layal Bahnam from Maharat Foundation highlighted the key challenge in Lebanon as being the issue of trust. Before COVID-19, the country was already facing corruption and a political crisis that had created huge public distrust in the government. On top of this, the large number of refugees – mainly Syrian and Palestinian – are not acknowledged when it comes to government messaging.

This distrust led to a lot of misinformation, particularly on social media, and the challenge for Maharat Foundation is to restore trust in media content. Rather than simply responding to comments on social media and fact-checking them, they took a different approach to build trust by providing accurate, evidence-based information via in-depth reporting. But this is not easy, since often the data is not accessible in the first place.

The Philippines

Mikhaela Dimpas from IDEALS explained that in the Philippines, many people were already having difficulty accessing basic needs before the pandemic hit. It’s a challenge to persuade someone to take steps to protect themselves from the virus, when they have mouths to feed at home. The other challenge is a language barrier, since there are many local languages, some of which are only spoken. Not only do people need to express themselves in a language they feel comfortable with, but translations can often lead to misinformation. In addition to this, many people don’t have access to cellphones or the internet, and using online channels would miss out large swaths of the population.

IDEALS uses Community Patrollers; people who are active in their community and who can relay local information, community based rumours and represent community interests. Many of these Community Patrollers are young and, as digital natives they can bridge that gap between the online and offline. They also act as ‘champions’ so that members of their community can ask them about rumours and information they’ve heard.

Based on this local information, IDEALS airs radio programmes and streams them on social media, where the audience can send in questions and rumours can be debunked in real time on the show. They’ve also opened up other channels for people to inform themselves and ask questions about COVID-19, such as messaging apps and a hotline where people can text in their concerns.

Some key takeaways mentioned by the hosts at the closing of the event were that building trust, by continually listening and responding to local communities, is key, and that local languages are very important for this.

From an ICT4D perspective, it was also clear that social media is a place where a lot of rumours and misinformation are spread, but which can also be used to tackle these. However, online channels cannot be used on their own, because there are always groups of people in any given community that don’t use them.

As Irene Scott put it during the event:

While social media is definitely a breeding ground for some rumours – a place where rumours go to spread very quickly and to move from social media to the community – it’s not the be all and end all, and only listening to social media means that you’re always missing a sector of the community.  By only collecting rumours from social media we’re excluding them from the conversation and we’re saying that we don’t want to listen to their opinion.

Irene Scott, Global Project Director, Rooted in Trust

It’s therefore important to understand where local people are communicating, meet them through the channels they feel comfortable with, while also bridging the gap between the online and the offline, to reach as many people as possible and ultimately, save lives.  

Do you know of any other ways to combat rumours using ICT? Please let us know in the comments.

This post is written by Jessica Wright. Find out more about the authors of this blog.