Seminar Summary — Think Twice Before You Believe: Combatting COVID-19 Misinformation in South Africa

The word “infodemic” emerged nearly two decades ago when journalist David Rothkopf wrote in a 2003 Washington Post article about the then-ongoing global SARS outbreak, “A few facts, mixed with fear, speculation and rumor, amplified and relayed swiftly worldwide by modern information technologies, have affected national and international economies, politics and even security in ways that are utterly disproportionate with the root realities.” Fusing the words “information” and “epidemic” into one, Rothkopf argued that a deluge of facts about SARS had intermingled with misinformation and washed across the internet, blowing the actual viral epidemic into even greater proportions as people struggled to distinguish true from false.

Another infodemic has burgeoned alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, with countless sources sharing information on everything from the origins of the virus to its symptoms to the best method of treatment. Some sources even falsely claimed that the virus was a hoax planned by malicious actors. With millions of people restricted to their homes with little to do but browse the internet for insight into the unprecedented virus, it became increasingly challenging to know what and who to believe.

Confronted with the current era of infodemics, Kevin Croke, Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a team of researchers set out to understand whether fact-checking tactics can effectively counter the kind of misinformation that leads people to engage in harmful behaviors during public health crises. In the first event of the Human Capital Initiative Fall 2022 Research Seminar Series on September 28, Croke presented the team’s new study examining whether sustained exposure to fact-checking content can sustainably change views of COVID-19 misinformation in South Africa, which was hit hard by COVID-19.

Croke and colleagues designed an intervention alongside Africa Check, the continent’s first independent fact-checking organization based in South Africa. Since 2012, Africa Check has opened offices in Senegal, Kenya and Nigeria and their fact-checking efforts have revealed errors in crime statistics, corrected information about teen pregnancies, clarified information on issues such as child prostitution and more. The problem of misinformation may be especially acute in sub-Saharan Africa as social media is the most affordable source of online information.

Croke’s team used Facebook ads to recruit study participants, who were then randomized into several treatment groups. Each treatment group received three COVID-19 fact-checks via WhatsApp messages on a biweekly basis over the course of six months. The team chose WhatsApp as the delivery method as it is used by over half of South African mobile phone owners. WhatsApp is also rife with misinformation due to the ease of sending links and messages to individuals or groups on the platform.

The content of the WhatsApp messages Croke’s team sent out differed for each treatment group: one group received a single-sentence summary of each fact-check and a link to a verification article; one group received fact-checks in the form of a short podcast; one group received a longer podcast; and a fourth group received fact-checks via an “empathetic” podcast that featured language emphasizing the hosts’ understanding of how fear and concern about family and friends might lead people to believe misinformation. Monthly optional fact-checking quizzes for participants were administered for a small incentive of mobile airtime.

The podcast treatments utilized a mode of fact-checking that Africa Check has been using since 2019. That year, they launched “What’s Crap on WhatsApp?”, a voice note show that collects the hottest misinformation topics circulating on the app, debunks them in less than ten minutes, and then distributes the episodes to WhatsApp users who have subscribed to the show. The titles of each episode clearly state the claim being addressed and whether or not it is factual; for example, a recent episode is titled “No, covid vaccines do not cause the body to produce toxic spike proteins that cause cancer!”

After sending out six months’ worth of fact-checks, Croke and colleagues found individuals who received fact checks demonstrated:

increased ability to discern between true and false stories and doubt prominent conspiracy theories;
increased ability to correctly answer incentivized quiz questions;
reduced trust in social media and sharing of content on social media;
some shift in self-reported COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors; and
no change in social media consumption or active efforts to verify information.

The text-only WhatsApp messages and empathetic podcast consistently produced larger effects than the other two podcast treatments.

The results of the study indicate that it is possible to sustainably alter individuals’ propensity to discern factual information from misinformation, and even to alter their actual public health behaviors, through low-cost interventions. The research team’s use of WhatsApp to both identify and debunk misinformation also provides compelling evidence of the power of meeting misinformation at the source, rather than trying to combat it through traditional media channels. Finally, the results also indicate the difficulty of incentivizing self-driven fact-checking. The study participants’ improved fact-checking skills were linked to the fact that fact-checks were sent directly to their inbox; the study did not alter participants’ likelihood of independently verifying information.

Overall, the findings from Croke and colleagues are an important contribution to efforts to better understand misinformation, its effects on public health and how the scientific community can encourage individuals to think twice before they believe.

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