Here's a quick thread of three top reads on coronavirus and information disorder for you today, collated by the First Draft monitoring team:
Ahead of the US election in a matter of weeks, when political tensions will be at their peak, Facebook still has much work to do to combat hateful and violent speech, reports @CaseyNewton for @verge
More than half of young Africans do not regard Facebook as a trustworthy source of news, a potential thorn in the side of the company’s plans for growth - @TheYomiKazeem reports for @qzafrica
Facebook and Twitter have removed accounts attempting to influence American voters before November’s presidential election, writes @BobbyAllyn for @NPR. They were reportedly removed "before any of them had gathered a large following"
2/12 Our Australia team continues its work at @UTSEngage, monitoring social media and conducting research on how to counter online mis- and dis-information. They will be an official partner of the @IFL_Brown
3/12 First Draft began in 2015 as a small nonprofit coalition that sprung out of a need: to understand, verify, and provide guidance on the misinformation we all were seeing on the social web. Over the following six years, we built out teams in London, New York, and Sydney.
A large amount of mis- and disinformation has circulated on social media in multiple languages over the past few days regarding #Ukraine. Trustworthy information is as important as ever in times of crisis, so here are our top tips and tools 👇
First and foremost, be wary of the difference between MISinformation and DISinformation. While they can seem interchangeable, the difference lies in the intent. Precise language is important e.g. propaganda can fall under the umbrella of disinformation
Second, visual misinformation gains a lot of attention. We’ve seen time and time again old photos and videos recirculated during times of crisis, which can cause more chaos and confusion. Preventing this can be as easy as running a reverse image search
1/ First Draft’s latest piece looks at anti-Muslim content spread on YouTube and TV news in India
2/ First Draft examined 70 headlines from stories about the Tablighi Jamaat run by some of India’s most-watched news channels, as well as a number of news outlets over the past year
3/ Of those headlines, we found that 27 used anti-Muslim language, while four made misleading, false or out-of-context claims
1/ How are climate change conspiracy theories and misinformation spreading cross-platforms and escalating over-time?
2/ First Draft’s @carlottadotto analyzed climate change-related conversations over the past year on the fringe platforms 4chan and 8kun. YouTube was the most popular domain used to support climate change denialism, followed by Bitchute, web archive links, and Wikipedia.
3/ The rampant use of YouTube links on 4chan and 8kun emphasizes how misinformation on the platform is being pushed to networks in other online spaces.
In the wake of recent vaccine announcements, reporters and policymakers need to be tracking “data deficits” — situations where demand for information about a topic is high, but the supply of credible information is low. We outline two of them below. 🧵👇firstdraftnews.org/long-form-arti…
1. mRNA technology, DNA alteration and foreign propaganda narratives. mRNA vaccines’ novelty and technical complexity complicates efforts to provide accessible and compelling information on this technology, while the incentive for bad actors to exploit this gap is high.
2. Measures of vaccine “effectiveness,” trial stages’ “interim” results and other limitations of the vaccine announcements. Information detailing these limitations are often missing from reporting, which could erode public confidence in Covid-19 vaccines.
Today the UK became the first Western country to approve a Covid-19 vaccine. Following this and other recent vaccine trial and approval announcements, here are five misinformation narratives reporters should be aware of when covering these stories. 🧵👇 firstdraftnews.org/latest/vaccine…
1. A Covid-19 vaccine is unnecessary; the immune system is superior. This narrative is now comparing Covid-19 survival rates to the efficacy rates of the current vaccines to suggest that our immune systems are more capable than vaccines in protecting us from Covid-19.
The narrative that hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness eliminates the need for a Covid-19 vaccine, highly popular among many Francophone communities in Europe and Africa, has been applied to recent vaccine trial announcements.