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Welcome to Noon Wednesday I'm Marisa Wojcik, multimedia journalist with Here & Now on PBS Wisconsin. Today is July 22nd. As COVID-19 rapidly spread across the globe conspiracy theories and misinformation about the novel coronavirus spread just as fast. Our guest today is working with students at UW-Madison to prepare them to have conversations that work to empower people and to make well informed decisions in an age where the pandemic has created an infodemic. So Ajay Sethi, Associate Professor in Population Health Sciences and the Faculty director of the Master of Public Health program joins us now and thank you so much for being here.
Thanks Marisa.
I want to start just, what do you consider to be a conspiracy theory?
Yeah so a conspiracy, a conspiracy theory is some sort of belief that people in a position of authority or some organization that's in power or has power you know, are working secretly or covertly to achieve some kind of objective that maybe not great for people or society and so believing in that would be the conspiracy theory. A famous one would be you know, the government faked the Moon Landing that still persists today. Conspiracy theories around 9/11, and COVID certainly has had quite a bit of conspiracies, the pandemic is a hoax. In China the claims are that the U.S. army brought COVID to China, in the U.S. that the virus escaped a lab and none of these are true.
Is the spread of misinformation inevitable?
Yeah, I think so, you know we're all human beings and so we have a psychology and it's our own psychology that kind of leads us down this path of you know, maybe seeking misinformation or adopting it and maybe spreading it and then maybe getting as far as sort of believing in conspiracy theories and so you know, this pandemic is a great example, it's a time of a lot of fear and uncertainty, we've never experienced anything like this before. That fear and uncertainty can give you and I and others, a sort of a feeling that we have kind of a loss of control. It can alter kind of you know, our perceived risks. Some people might even be in complete denial that there is a pandemic that's going on, if you have to accept that there's a pandemic, you also have to accept what you need to do to stop the spread and that's a very daunting task. So people naturally will want to avoid that. This is also kind of a time when you know, Public Health is at the forefront for fighting COVID and our government gives public health authorities the opportunity to fight diseases like COVID through the 10th Amendment of our constitution, Police Powers. It's what gives States the right to protect the health and welfare of its citizens. Well, that also creates a little tension because some people you know, don't want to be told what to do and so there's, there's sort of a desire to you know, some people are more leaning towards that libertarian side, some people feel like authoritarianism is okay, some people are more conservative, some are more liberal and all of that you know, creates this high emotion and this sort of maybe thinking to gravitate towards information that is this alternative reality.
Does the fast pace at which new information about COVID comes out also add fuel to that fire?
Yeah so I would say, you know we definitely have this infodemic, we've never seen this particular coronavirus before. There's over 20, 25,000 scientific papers that have been published you know, since the beginning of this year alone, that's a lot of information that's being generated by scientists. And then in parallel with that, are individuals interpreting that information or maybe supplementing that information with other sort of things that they're putting out into media, social media. This is just, it's really just kind of overwhelming any consumer you know, trying to sift through all that make, sense of that especially when there can, there can sometimes be contradictory information, so you have to have a keen eye to interpret all that and that just creates more confusion. And I think that also you know, it further fuels this, this uncertainty that gives us that loss of control.
So there's misinformation and then there's disinformation, what's the difference between those two and which one are we seeing more of right now?
So I would say I wouldn't quantified frankly like whether there's more one than the other but I would guess there's a lot of misinformation and then we define that as really incorrect information that's spread by someone who is well intentioned maybe they're using a lot of cognitive shortcuts, heuristics to sift through information to encapsulate it into a sound bite or a message that doesn't have a lot of context and they might get it wrong and they might spread that, it creates conversations and then next thing you realize it's not really on target. Disinformation is when you have incorrect information that's spread deliberately in order to create that confusion and there certainly is disinformation campaigns that are occurring as well,
Who are those bad actors?
It really can be, it can be easily defined as like single individuals who are you know, spreading disinformation intentionally also organizations, foreign governments. All governments have propaganda campaigns, particularly during war time so we can't say it's always somebody else, the U.S. has also been involved in this also in the past but in the context of COVID you know, we've seen already foreign governments sort of infiltrating social media and you know, creating these false narratives around COVID, stay at home orders, whether they're gonna work or not, mask use and some social media bots and trolls have already been traced to China and also Russia. And we shouldn't be surprised by that the Russian government was already implicated for interfering in the 2016 election. It was around that time, they were also involved in a disinformation campaign around vaccination. It was 2016 which is also when we were experiencing Measles outbreaks in this country for the first time in a long time.
So you're saying social media is also amplifying a lot of these things.
Social media definitely serves as a catalyst. It's also you know, a source of really good information. I mean internet is, and we can have this conversation because of the internet and there are plenty of you know, good websites and you know, good Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts that you and I can access to be able to get good high quality information but that avenue of spreading information is also used opportunistically to spread disinformation and then sometimes also spread these conspiracy theories. The companies that you know, the major players like Twitter and Facebook for example, you know, a lot of conversation right now about how to sort of handle misinformation and particularly disinformation that's spread deliberately, should these companies have a role in, in sort of blocking content or maybe tagging or flagging content and only recently have they actually started to develop policies around this because I think they recognize this as being a growing problem. Facebook has generally allowed a lot of content of all types on their platform and you can see consumers and advertisers right now are pulling back from Facebook 'cause they're unsatisfied with maybe that approach. So free market forces are sort of in play here. Twitter on the other hand has been a little bit more aggressive I think for handling disinformation even this morning in the news was deleting 7,000 accounts that were affiliated with QAnon sort of a loosely formed group of people who quote or quote question everything and sort of have these beliefs about the deep state.
Are the COVID conspiracy theories that you're seeing have any grain of truth or are they completely false and unfounded?
So sometimes they are completely false and they, they may be based on some maybe poor data analysis or some, some really poor correlations that somebody puts out there but if you just dig a little deeper and sometimes you don't even have to dig that deeply, you can quickly debunk those conspiracies. Sometimes though some sort of conspiracies are gonna be rooted into some source of distrust versus mistrust, so we can distinguish that as well, where mistrust is when you know, you feel that somebody else or some organization didn't do something that you, that wasn't right, that you no longer trust them but if it's based on the experience of mistrust or lack of trust then we call it distrust based on somebody's experience. And we find that a lot of conspiracies or sort of you know, misinformation that's out there stems from experience maybe unintended consequences that had occurred you know, there may be some grain of truth but at some point it evolves to something that's, that is actually indeed false.
So the objectives of the course that you have taught are to be familiar with these conspiracy theories and give students the skills to address them in conversation, how do you go about doing that? (chuckles)
Well you know, I start off the class with, you know sort of a question about, you know are you a conspiracy theorist? And I want students from the very beginning to recognize as we just you know talked about that our own psychology will sometimes lead us down the path of adopting misinformation and starting to believe in conspiracies and the example I always use is sports, you may not be a sports fan but almost of us know a sports fan and here is a situation where you have one team against another, you've got sort of, it's right for binary thinking which is also not a healthy thing to do, it's things are neither, usually not either, or but if your team lost at the last second you know, under a high emotion situation, you might, your mind might immediately go towards the refs making a call and maybe even were paid off to make that call. Now you have no evidence for that but maybe you recognize some controversial calls in the past, you know about refs who took bribes 10 years ago and so suddenly that forms your worldview and you're suddenly thinking like a conspiracy theorist. I want students to get to know that our minds can lead us down this path all the time so when you see a patient, a client, a member of the community to actually maybe have some empathy for people who also go down these different paths because of the set of facts that they have before them, it's not the same evidence that you use but they're using the same cognitive processes that we all do when we process information so we definitely focus on popular and less popular conspiracies. I think people should be aware of the ones that are circulating or that have been around for a while that we also focus on the psychosocial basis of it and then we get right into those skills using counseling and principles of counseling, motivational interviewing, crisis counseling, risk communication as a basis for having these tough conversations.
What important decisions are on the horizon that people need reliable science-based information?
Well, the one that, the forefront right now is mask use. The science has shifted a little bit on mask use now that we know that a asymptomatic spread for COVID is quite significant and that it can occur you know, several days before somebody actually presents with symptoms. So the previous recommendation was to not wear mask. It was also at a time when we were experiencing a lot of PPE shortages for healthcare workers and so the desire was not for the public to consume PPE that was otherwise needed for a healthcare system. Now that evidence has shifted and hopefully people can see that as being okay to understand that based on our new knowledge, mask uses, mask use is recommended and mandates slowly are being issued and the norms are shifting I think but that's something we're certainly trying to get everybody to do right now. School closures is another one that's obviously a hot topic and also the reopening of schools and then deciding when it's okay to close again and reopen again, all of that is going to require sifting through information carefully so that everybody understands is on board as those decisions are made.
All right, Ajay Sethi, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, Marisa, I appreciate it
For more from Here & Now and PBS Wisconsin, you can visit pbswisconsin.org. And thank you so much for joining us on Noon Wednesday.
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