Coronavirus Panic vs. H1N1 Meh...
Plus: should campaigns complain about misleading content to platforms?
When the H1N1 flu sickened more than a million Americans, killing at least 4,000, in 2009 and 2010, years worth of truth decay had yet to fully settle. For the most part, the information dissemination infrastructure that today sets our pulses racing with notifications (making every moment feel like Sept. 12, 2001) existed in rudimentary form. Our focus was elsewhere. The flu wasn’t new. Its yearly death toll is priced into the expectations we have for our own mortality. And the media did not make the story front-and-center in a way that forces everyone to pay attention.
Today, it seems the margin between complacency and panic is tissue-thin. Communicating in memes, in chyrons, in 280 characters, as we all seem to do, means there is no room for nuance. Literally: there is no room — 280 characters is not enough room — for nuance.
What appears true is:
•COVID-19 is spreading in the United States. There are community clusters. Mass precautions are warranted.
•COVID-19 can be very dangerous to those with underlying / secondary health issues, like a history of smoking, and to the elderly. For most people, it will be relatively mild.
•The best medical minds cannot definitively answer critical questions yet, like what differentiates severe cases from asymptomatic ones and precisely how people who don’t show symptoms can shed the virus.
•Mass panic is not warranted and where it exists, it based on mistakes of commission, mistakes of omission, abundances of caution, and simply the way the media works. (Each new death is reported; we see lots of dying even though there is little dying.)
Horrifyingly, while 68 percent of Democrats are “somewhat” or “very worried” that they or someone they know will contract the virus, 35 percent of Republicans express the same fears. Mistrust, fed by ignorance and wishful thinking, combined with partisan animus, is untethering our minds. There is no doubt that President Trump’s reassurances about how rates will go down, and his insistence about how tests are available to everyone, are sticking in the minds of people who are inclined to believe what he says; the media is amplifying his misinformation by repeating the claims in order to debunk them, which might have the effect of further angering Trump’s base. (This base has been conditioned to believe that an entire bureaucracy exists to undermine the President. The federal health bureaucracy is coordinating the response.)
We are a mobile-first nation; older people use screens (and Facebook and talk radio).
It took nearly two months for the U.S. government to create a website, https://www.coronavirus.com/, and almost just as long for the executive branch to settle around one messenger: Vice President Mike Pence. The CDC website was not updated over the weekend (!).
Meanwhile, we’ve forced public health officials at the local level to be communicators in chief. Many have rudimentary public communication training, but many others don’t. They are improvising.
It would be wise, for instance, to twin public health instructions (Wash Your Hands, Then Vote) with a “why;” that “why” should be a simple visual metaphor. To me, “flattening the curve” is as good as any. The flatter the curve, the fewer people will suffer over time. And you — you the individual — can help flatten the curve.
Election Disinformation Update
Twice in one week, Facebook insisted that the Trump campaign was within its rights to put out misleading content. Twice in a week, after public pressure, they volte-faced. I wrote about the campaign’s use of census imagery to collect data and information; the latest reversal was about whether to restrict the dissemination of a video that was edited to make Joe Biden appear to be doddering and senile. Biden’s campaign manager, Greg Schultz, decided to go all Elizabeth Warren over Facebook, accusing the company of being “willing to be one of the world’s most effective mediums for the spread of vile lies.” Facebook initially did nothing; then, it added a content flag to the video, warning that “independent fact checkers” had found the video to be at least partly false. Trump’s campaign responded by pointing out examples of Facebook’s ceaseless inconsistency about content like this. The Trump people have a point, Facebook has a point, and Biden’s team has a point.
Facebook has been inconsistent. This is one reason why they didn’t want to get into the business of truth-policing in the first place, even though they arguably have the responsibility to try. There is no strong, consistent standard; there will always be edge cases; ugliness can be in the eye of the beholder.
Twitter labeled the video “manipulated,” although you can still see it and retweet it.
And here, to me, is the most interesting question of all: does the coverage of the controversy amplify the misleading video’s reach? Or — does labeling something as manipulated do anything to persuade people who already believe that Biden is senile that they are mistaken? Given the reach of President Trump, perhaps the amplification effect here is one of replication; the same people will see the misleading video more times, and it might stick around in their minds more.
The Biden campaign is in a tough spot; the more they complain, the more people watch the video. They don’t have an organic army to fight back against Disinformation on their behalf.