Thread by @joyopal

We studied misinformation around COVID-19 in India since Jan 2020. Results + full archive here:

joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/temporal-patte…

Misinformation has:
1. grown steadily, particularly after Janata Curfew
2. moved towards cultural issues

@SyedaZainabA @saumya_sagarika @Divyanshukukret 👏

Misinformation about curing COVID-19 has declined as more people have been made aware there is no cure.

So while fact-based misinformation appears to be declining, misinformation that tries to create emotional affect - cultural issues, police brutality etc. have increased.

In particular, since the Tablighi Jamaat case surfaced, the misinformation has turned significantly against Muslims as we see in this figure comparing wordclouds of tags to misinformation in three 10-day periods since mid-March.

Category 1: Messages intended to create some form of panic such as stories about essential commodities disappearing, fake shutdown notices of businesses and cash shortages.

Category 2: Fear-invoking messages related to deaths, suicides & suffering of people in the pandemic. Distinct from death statistics, these show viscerality of the condition, ie symptoms, visuals of death, pain etc. intended to cause distress in the viewer

Category 3: Messages that are based in a reference to a specific cultural group and claim that it impacts the prevalence of the virus/its spread.

Category 4: Messages about cure/treatments such as home remedies (including terms such as lemon, vinegar etc.) and alternative medicines (Ayush, herbs etc)

Category 5: Messages that have exaggerated numbers of positive cases or death counts and fake advisories about COVID, usually pretending to be from an institution that supplies formal statistics or deals clinically with COVID.

Category 6: Messages that purport to have government announcements and advisories and refer to police, judiciary and official institutions

Category 7: Messages about nature and the environment including around origins of the virus and nature-related potential causes, the second has been on the impact of the virus on nature.

Different kinds of messages use different kinds of media. Misinformation purporting cures or statistics tend to be more text based, misinformation about casualties, culture tend to be more visual

Several mainstream media houses, including @TOIKochiNews @CNNnews18 @indiatvnews have put out widely circulated misinformation. Public figures including @kiranshaw have as well. Many did not remove the misinformation after it was debunked.

Research was based on data from Tattle Civic Technologies, w/debunked messages from @factchecknet certified factcheckers including @boomlive_in @FactlyIndia @AltNews @IndiaToday
@QuintFactCheck @NewsMobileIndia 🙏🙏

List of debunked news available to public at above link.