“In these unprecedented and uncertain times, we are committed to etc. etc.”

When everything else in the world seems to be as unpredictable as a midnight fever dream, those words at least seem to be constant. Why wouldn’t it be? The COVID-19 pandemic has become something impossible for any of us to avoid or ignore, so why wouldn’t everyone try to hit those relatability points and add some pretense of familiarity? Why do you think all my articles have been about COVID-19?

This year, everything changed when the coronavirus attacked, but when the world wanted simple and easy answers, we got estimations, degrees of confidence, and public health recommendations. Science is complicated, what is to be expected? These were hardly the answers the masses wanted to hear, so the search for answers continued until what was wanted was found.

Guess where that led to?

Lockdown measures meant there has arguably never been a time when so many Americans are spending so much time on the internet. Two years ago, Dr. Heidi Larson from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine predicted in a Nature journal article: “the deluge of conflicting information on social media should be recognized as a global public-health threat.” Can we proudly proclaim that we’ve successfully avoided this predicament? When we couldn’t get experts to give us the simple answers we wanted to comfort ourselves with certainty, we looked to social networks, tabloids, and amateur bloggers.

Of course, living in this internet age also presents a plethora of opportunities to better manage a disease outbreak. Digital technologies provide a platform to communicate essential information to a mass audience in situations such as now when social distancing has become so important. In another article earlier this year, Dr. Larson and her team highlighted the way the EBODAC project (which combated the 2014 Ebola epidemic) took advantage of this digital age we live in. The initiative included country-level digital strategies in several nations to assist with communication and engagement with the deployment of Ebola vaccine trials while working around the problems that arose from wide-spread quarantine measures. Additionally, the EBODAC project also took advantage of social networks by monitoring circulating rumours to better guide management strategies to promote acceptance of the crucial Ebola vaccine.

So, social media can - and has in the past - been harnessed to assist public health response during a disease outbreak. Is that happening right now? Various spectacular methods for combating COVID-19 that have obviously undergone rigorous testing under the highest scrutiny such as drinking ginger tea, gargling bleach, and injecting sunlight into our veins have found themselves a platform through social media to profusely proliferate and disseminate. While this age of interactive media makes us susceptible to passively inhaling inaccuracies and misinformation, in a desperate effort to do something about this situation and with a global platform at our fingertips we are now evermore susceptible to further transmit these falsehoods and help further fuel this dumpster fire of a global pandemic.

We can do better than this.

In times of such high stress and desperation, many of us have become susceptible to lapses in critical thinking. In a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Regina that recruited 1,700 U.S. adults, participants were far worse at discerning truths from falsehoods when deciding what to share on social media as opposed to being directly asked about its accuracy. Incredibly enough, a simple reminder to think about the accuracy of a headline nearly tripled the level of truth discernment in participants’ subsequent sharing intentions.

We can do better than this.

In our uncertainty, we’ve become desperate for anything to latch onto. However, it is a state of doubt that cultivates our curiosity, and when nurtured in an open-minded environment, it could bloom into a beautiful flower of knowledge. Embrace your sense of uncertainty, and think critically about the information you consume and spread.

Give yourself a second - just a second - to doubt yourself. To ask yourself: how accurate is this really?

References:

Larson HJ. The biggest pandemic risk? Viral misinformation. Nature. 2018 Oct 16;562(7727):309–309.

Depoux A, Martin S, Karafillakis E, Preet R, Wilder-Smith A, Larson H. The pandemic of social media panic travels faster than the COVID-19 outbreak. J Travel Med [Internet]. 2020 May 18 [cited 2020 Sep 30];27(3). Available from: https://academic.oup.com/jtm/article/27/3/taaa031/5775501

Pennycook G, McPhetres J, Zhang Y, Lu JG, Rand DG. Fighting COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media: Experimental Evidence for a Scalable Accuracy-Nudge Intervention. Psychol Sci. 2020 Jul 1;31(7):770–80.