Preventing next infodemic must begin now
Science communication consultant and trainer from Egypt, in the Health Communication STEP held on November 26, proposed a number of measures needed to be taken in order to “prevent the next infodemic.”
MSTF Media reports:
Mohamed Elsonbaty Ramadan, freelance science journalist, and science communication consultant and trainer from Egypt, during the virtual Science and Technology Exchange Program (STEP) held on November 26, delved into the approaches that can be adopted to not only deal with COVID-19 infodemic, but also prevent the next infodemic.
He defined infodemic according to the WHO as “overabundance of information” during an epidemic—whether accurate news or misinformation.
Infodemic can lead to “confusion and mistrust” in governments and “negative public health response,” he continued, adding that this can have an adverse impact on health—on the “individual, national, and global levels.”
Ramadan described “how the health information is flowing” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When the WHO announced that COVID-19 has turned into a global pandemic, all sorts of media around the world became eager to cover it; as it could affect the life of each person on the face of the earth on different levels, he said.
So, “the broadcasting media and newspapers have been the key players in transferring the scientific knowledge from the scientific community to the public,” he continued.
Moreover, there is the social media, where people not only are the consumers of information, but also spread information.
Hence, at the beginning of the pandemic, the public was “bombarded with information” coming from everywhere, mainly the television, newspapers, and social media.
“From my point of view, some problems emerged within this flow of information that resulted in experiencing COVID-19 infodemic,” he said.
First of all, we discovered that the non-specialized media are not ready to deal with scientific content—at least in the Middle East.
Highlighting that the media are a little confused in dealing with scientific content, he said many of them are successful in covering political, economic, and sports news, but “when it comes to science, they are not that much successful in doing so, because science has not been there before,” he noted.
The media “misunderstand the specific nature of science” and how covering scientific news can be different from covering other types of information, Elsonbaty Ramadan continued.
It was also found out that “they do not have good connection with the scientific community,” he added.
Secondly, it seems that “the scientific community is not that much willing to communicate science to the public and also to deal with the media,” he maintained.
Furthermore, “the public audience are media-illiterate.” In other words, they do not know how they should deal with the information coming through the media.
Therefore, if the media tries to promote or broadcast pseudoscience, “the public does not have the ability to judge the information flowing from the media,” he remarked.
On the other hand, with the COVID-19 outbreak, the public started to share a lot of information through the social media platforms; they did not care whether those pieces of information were accurate or not, “they just shared them anyway,” he said.
“Social media are primarily atmospheres where people freely express their opinions regardless of their accuracy, while spreading science news must be evidence-based,” he added.
“There are many fundamental problems with the social media platforms themselves; they are not designed be a source of information,” he continued.
Moreover, the algorithms based on which the social media work, form “a bubble” in which you are surrounded by people who are of the same opinion as you, he emphasized.
“These algorithms reinforce the bubbles, so you see what you already believe in; you are not exposed to other points of view,” he continued.
According to Elsonbaty Ramadan, the social media make it very easy to “form different groups of people isolated in their bubbles.”
Due to all the mentioned problems that emerged within the flow of information, we started to have infodemic everywhere.
Raising the issue that many individuals, due to the COVID-19 infodemic, have taken wrong decisions concerning their health, he asserted that the solution to this is “infodemic management,” which is defined by the WHO as ‘applying evidence-based interventions to disseminate understandable, localized evidence-based information to citizens and drive positive health-seeker behavior.’
“Several interventions can be applied in the attempt to prevent the next infodemic,” he contended.
Putting forward suggestions for preventing the next infodemic, he said: “We need to build capacity in media in terms of covering science.”
“We need to train media professionals as well,” he continued.
Moreover, it is pivotal to build capacity in scientific community on how they can communicate science better, “because there is a serious lack of science communication skills among scientists and researchers in many countries,” he observed.
In COVID-19 pandemic, “we found out that in many Middle Eastern countries, numerous media outlets lack fact-checking,” he said.
He said: “I believe that fact-checking in media organizations is very crucial.”
On the other hand, the public needs to be media-literate; they must be taught how the media works and how they can assess the information they receive through media, he observed.
“At the same time, the public needs to be more aware of what they share on social media,” he added.
Besides that, “they should report posts that promote pseudoscience or misinformation” when encountering a false news on social media, he continued.
As Elsonabty Ramadan stated, even though the social media were not primarily designed to be sources of information, now that many individuals are depending on the social media feed as the source of news, these platforms should provide some kinds of mechanisms to stop the dissemination of misinformation.
“This can be achieved by doing fact-checking or observing the accounts that are trying to spread the misinformation,” he added.
However, “some of these platforms are cooperating with the WHO to prevent their atmospheres from being the source of misinformation,” he highlighted.
Elsonabty Ramadan concluded that to prevent the next infodemic, we need collaboration between all the stakeholders starting from the scientific community including scientists, research organizations, and health authorities.
Technology platforms, the media, journalists, and the public must cooperate as well, so that we can stop the spread of misinformation and prevent infodemic.
This will indeed “have positive consequences on the health of the individuals and communities,” he said.
The “National Policy and Institutional Framework for Health Communication” STEP, jointly organized by ECO Science Foundation (ECOSF) and the Mustafa Science and Technology Foundation (MSTF), convened distinguished science communicators from Pakistan, Malaysia, Iran, and Egypt. This virtual event was attended by 50 participants from 13 countries: Uganda, Bangladesh, Iran, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Azerbaijan, Canada, Oman, the Philippines, Algeria, Lebanon, and Belgium.
