Social media menace

Social media menace

Beware of fake news going viral faster than Covid-19. It will cost lives, literally.

The fight against coronavirus stands or falls on whether authentic information about it can be provided to citizens. However, social media now threatens to throw a monkey wrench into the works. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, healthcare has replaced politics as the happy hunting ground for purveyors of fake news on social media. The fakery takes avatars like purported health advisories, home remedies to ward off coronavirus, miracle cures by babas, conspiracy theories, unscientific claims of virus transmission, to downright peddling of xenophobia.

With fake news about coronavirus going viral faster than the disease itself, citizens deriving their information from social media rather than trusted sources such as this newspaper or an official WHO website is a dangerously worrying prospect. Social media can create panic about the disease which is unwarranted. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, it can give rise to a dangerous complacency – such as in the widespread WhatsApp forward that holding a hair dryer close to one’s throat will destroy the coronavirus lodged in it. Such misinformation could literally kill people.

Recall the child and cattle lifting rumours and the mob lynchings they triggered – that potential for mischief and mayhem gets multiplied many times over in the season of coronavirus. If social media was originally conceived to help people stay in touch with family and friends, unfortunately what constitutes “staying in touch” today is quite often mindless forwarding of WhatsApp messages, sharing of Facebook posts and retweets on Twitter. Misinformation gets amplified in this process. Social distancing mustn’t become a metaphor for citizens disconnected from reality itself.

Government needs to drill into people the importance of relying on trusted sources of information. It must also question social media platforms about their claims to self-regulate. Before they can cause more damage preying upon social anxieties, stoking panic, spreading quackery and putting lives at danger, platforms must urgently take corrective action, or be made to do so. Since government’s power to regulate them is restricted if their servers are abroad, they must be forced to store their data on local servers. With great disruption in store if Covid-19 containment efforts take longer than expected, these are tasks that need urgent attention. Social media users must also use due discretion, and derive their information only from trusted sources.