The Viral Flaw That Plagues Social Media

Even before the World Health Organization has declared the novel coronavirus outbreak as a public health emergency, the social media sphere has been circulating rumors, hoaxes, and even memes for quite some time. A good example is a collection of posts about the Chinese bat cuisine accompanying an image of a young lady consuming the exotic animal which has long been speculated by social media users as the origin of a brand new epidemic, however, this has already been proven to be a hoax  (Taylor, 2020).  As the disease outbreak progressed into a global pandemic, social media has since then propagated the growth of misinformation and unverifiable information at an alarmingly high rate as a direct correlation to an increasing number of public discourses regarding the novel coronavirus (Kouzy et al., 2020).

Unarguably, misinformation has long existed before social media. One example of this is the idea that the widespread HIV in the 1980s was the result of an alleged bioweapon developed by The Pentagon. The story gained a lot of traction and appeared in major newspapers of over 50 countries. This was, however, revealed to be a disinformation campaign run by the KGB, a Soviet Union security agency, to undermine the credibility of the United States at that time (Bailey, 2020).

A lot has changed since then. The period between the emergence of HIV and the emergence of COVID-19 has allowed tools such as the internet and personal devices to pave the general public with new ways of accessing and sharing information. The most prominent example of this is social media. It is reported that 62% of the US population access the news through social media, replacing both television and newspaper (Gottfried and Shearer, 2020). Furthermore, the enforced coronavirus lockdown in many countries has limited the passing of essential information especially those regarding health precautions through physical means. As a result, an increasing number of people are resorting to social media as their sole source of information. It is indisputable that in the time of public health emergencies, delivering the correct information to the general public has become all the more important. Failing to do so will consequently result in the loss of countless lives.

Adversely, the problem of misinformation on social media has continued to worsen the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic regarding both the social and the well-being aspect of the general public. One example of this is the incitement of xenophobia as a result of the pandemic. The misunderstanding of the disease has lead to unnecessary racial tensions, escalating to cases of hate crimes in many countries around the world. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic where the majority of its cases were prominently from China, social media platforms witnessed a spike in the number of posts featuring Anti-Chinese rhetoric. These posts range from the understandable questioning of the action of the Chinese government to the more problematic harassment of the Chinese people. Cases of harassment and attacks against travelers from China and, even more bafflingly, other people of Asian ethnicity who have no affiliation with China have consequently spiked (COVID-19 stoking xenophobia, hate, and exclusion, minority rights expert warns, 2020). 

Inversely, as the epicenter of the COVID-19 has supposedly shifted outside of China and most of the COVID-19 cases in mainland China are as a result of people arriving from other countries, xenophobic rhetoric on the Chinese social media has begun to spread. Unjustifiable cases of discrimination and hate towards foreigners have been, ironically, increased in mainland China. A series of illustrations called “Illustrations of foreign trash” by Jin Li Qingnian, a Chinese illustrator, has been shared by many of the Chinese netizens on Weibo, one of the biggest social media platforms in the country (Walden and Yang, 2020).

The effect of misinformation on social media can likewise be seen in public health. Repeated exposure to COVID-19 contents designed to be sensationalized and fear-mongering can lead users to inaccurately estimate the threat to their communities, causing psychological distress. The psychological issues caused by the increased stress response as a result of sensationalized and fear-mongering contents then further induce the general public to overtax healthcare facilities. A surge of emergency department visits means that several misplaced healthcare workers and resources are put to handle an influx of concerned patients rather than people at a higher risk of coronavirus infection (Garfin, Silver and Holman, 2020).

In defense of social media companies, some countermeasures are put into place to combat misinformation amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. These efforts can be seen throughout many popular social media platforms in collaboration with the World Health Organization to reduce any misinformation and make users stay informed. “COVID-19 Information Centre” is the first search result that appears on the Facebook search engine when the search contains keywords such as “Covid19”, “Coronavirus”, or “Novel coronavirus pneumonia”. The same practice could be seen on Youtube, Twitter, and Reddit. Within the link, users are presented with the supposedly curated updates or facts regarding the situation of the COVID-19 from recognized health organizations such as the World Health Organization and other local official health organizations depending on the country of the users. Youtube has even gone the extra step of refusing to place advertisements on videos that contain the word “Coronavirus” or “COVID-19” so that no content creators can generate revenues off of the global pandemic. Nonetheless, the preventive measures done by these major platforms are mere evidence of the fact that misinformation is a major problem plaguing social media. In other words, the COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered the deep-rooted problem manifesting modern-day’s most prominent form of communication. The fundamental way in which social media sites operate needs to be acknowledged to better understand the issue.

Around 3 billion people worldwide were reported to use social media websites and applications. This becomes a challenge for the platforms to deliver the right content to the right user. Strategies such as user profiling and content personalization were implemented in order to keep the user’s engagement high. However, in reality, sensationalized contents that are provocative in nature tend to better permeate into the personalized newsfeed under the social media algorithm. Negative responses, more often than not, become the fuel for the circulation of both information and misinformation around the platform. The phenomenon is in line with a long studied notion of negativity bias which stated that negative things have a greater psychological effect on an individual than neutral or positive things and that “one feature of negative events that make them dominant is that negative entities are more contagious than positive entities”(Rozin and Royzman, 2001). The factor that makes resolving this major flaw in the social media algorithm difficult, however, is that the algorithm has nevertheless proven to be highly successful under the metric of user engagement for advertising purposes.

With that being stated, it would be interesting to see the impact in which the collaborative efforts have on combating misinformation as it could be argued that these countermeasures seem to be an equivalent of putting a band-aid on a bullet wound as the spread of misinformation on social media is, in itself, structural in which the global pandemic has merely helped to accentuate. In conclusion, a reform in the algorithm which highly depends on the fundamental way social media companies operate business-wise is urgently required in order for society to better be equipped in dealing with the next worldwide crisis. Therefore, the general public highly needs to collectively acknowledge the vital flaw within the social media machine and the damage it has consequentially done to the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic in order that a call for change could be made possible.