Fighting fake news in the COVID-19 era: policy insights from an equilibrium model
- PDF / 3,951,639 Bytes
- 24 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 31 Downloads / 212 Views
Fighting fake news in the COVID‑19 era: policy insights from an equilibrium model Kris Hartley1 · Vu Minh Khuong2
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The COVID-19 crisis has revealed structural failures in governance and coordination on a global scale. With related policy interventions dependent on verifiable evidence, pandemics require governments to not only consider the input of experts but also ensure that science is translated for public understanding. However, misinformation and fake news, including content shared through social media, compromise the efficacy of evidence-based policy interventions and undermine the credibility of scientific expertise with potentially longer-term consequences. We introduce a formal mathematical model to understand factors influencing the behavior of social media users when encountering fake news. The model illustrates that direct efforts by social media platforms and governments, along with informal pressure from social networks, can reduce the likelihood that users who encounter fake news embrace and further circulate it. This study has implications at a practical level for crisis response in politically fractious settings and at a theoretical level for research about post-truth and the construction of fact. Keywords Fake news · Policy sciences · Equilibrium model · COVID-19
Introduction ‘This is a free country. Land of the free. Go to China if you want communism’ yelled an American protester at a nurse counter-protesting the resumption of commercial activity 5 weeks into the country’s COVID-19 crisis (Armus and Hassan 2020). Like many policy challenges, the COVID-19 crisis is exposing deep-seated political and epistemological divisions, fueled in part contestation over scientific evidence and ideological tribalism stoked in online communities. The proliferation of social media has democratized access to information with evident benefits, but also raises concerns about the difficulty users face in distinguishing between truth and falsehood. The perils of ‘fake news’—false information masquerading as verifiable truth, often disseminated online—are acutely apparent during * Kris Hartley [email protected] 1
Department of Asian and Policy Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong SAR, China
2
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Policy Sciences
public health crises, with false equivalence drawn between scientific evidence and uninformed opinion. In an illustrative episode from April 2020, the scientific community’s largely consensus views about the need for social distancing to limit the spread of COVID-19 were challenged by protesters in the American states of Minnesota, Michigan, and Texas, who demanded in rallies that governors immediately relax social distancing protocols and reopen shuttered businesses. Populist skepticism about COVID-19 response in the USA had arguably been growing since President Donald Trump’s ea
Data Loading...
