Covid misinformation is thriving on fringe platforms despite counter efforts

Around the country, countless Americans are suffering a very particular type of Covid grief — a mixture of anger, sorrow and shame that comes with losing a loved one who has consumed social media falsehoods. On Tuesday, in what was likely his last appearance in the White House briefing room before he retires from government service at the end of the year, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, pleaded with Americans to speak out against scientific misinformation.

“The people who have correct information, who take science seriously, who don’t have strange, way-out theories about things but who base what they say on evidence and data, need to speak up more,” Dr. Fauci said, “because the other side that just keeps putting out misinformation and disinformation seems to be tireless in that effort.”

Experts say the spread of health misinformation — particularly on fringe social media platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the coronavirus pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.

“There has been such an incredible focus on developing vaccines quickly,” said Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, adding: “But from my perspective, there’s a missing piece there — a missing social behavioral piece. You can get a vaccine out to people in 100 days but they think it’s poison? You’ve still got a big problem.”

In preparation for future pandemics, the White House recently released a new national biodefense strategy that calls for the government to “enhance messaging partnerships” before another biological threat emerges. The goal, said Dr. Raj Panjabi, Mr. Biden’s top adviser on global health security, is to work with “reputable companies who care about getting the message right.”

But fighting misinformation has become political in itself — and has landed the Biden administration in court, opposite the attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, both Republicans, who have accused it of suppressing free speech on matters like Covid-19 and elections by working with social media giants including Facebook and Twitter.

Dr. Fauci will be deposed in that case on Wednesday. On Monday, a federal appeals court, siding with the Justice Department, put on hold a lower court’s order requiring Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the surgeon general, and two other administration officials to sit for their own depositions.

...

It is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the precise toll that Covid misinformation has taken on American society, but scholars are trying. In a report published last year, Dr. Sell and her colleagues estimated that 5 to 30 percent of unvaccinated Americans were influenced by Covid falsehoods. At George Washington University, Sarah Wagner, a social anthropologist who researches death and mourning, has a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to study the effects of Covid misinformation.

...