With Panic Spreading, Who’s Giving to Curb Misinformation About COVID-19?

When civic-minded funders turned their attention to fighting fake news in the wake of Donald Trump’s unexpected victory, many hoped their efforts would stem the tide of misinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election. Few, I’m sure, anticipated the role misinformation would play in sowing chaos in a world reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happening on social media right now. Bad actors claim that governments created the coronavirus as a bioweapon. Some publish bogus maps, out-of-context images, or content showing that sick people are being “exterminated.” Nor are all purveyors of fake news malicious. CVS’s chief medical officer circulated a post to the company’s 30,000 employees advising (incorrectly) that “drinking warm water is an effective way to wash the virus into your stomach, where it is killed.”

The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) based at the Poynter Institute has been on the case since January, coordinating the #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance with more than 100 fact checkers in at least 45 countries. Now comes word that a new partnership between the IFCN and Facebook will broaden this work and improve the network’s reach.

Equipped with a budget of $1 million, the partnership will distribute flash grants to organizations engaged in activities including, but not limited to, translating fact checks to different languages, working with health experts for evidence-based and scientific coverage, and audience development initiatives to better reach people with reliable information.

The fact-checking community can apply through ifcn.submittable.com between March 18 and April 1, 2020. Accepted applications will be awarded grants up to $50,000. The applications are only open to the fact-checking units that are active members of the #CoronaVirusFacts alliance and to IFCN’s verified signatories.

Combatting COVID-19 Misinformation

In a March 17th blog post, Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook’s head of health, presented an overview of the company’s efforts to “make sure everyone has access to accurate information, stop misinformation and harmful content, and support global health experts, local governments, businesses and communities” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Facebook will remove harmful COVID-19 misinformation on its Instagram service, and will not allow Instagram users to search for COVID-19-related augmented reality effects unless they were developed in partnership with a recognized health organization. Facebook banned ads and listings selling medical face masks and “will make necessary updates to our policies if we see people trying to exploit this public health emergency,” Director of Product Management Rob Leathern wrote in a tweet.

Meanwhile, the Facebook Journalism Project is partnering with the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Local Media Association to offer a total of $1 million in grants to local news organizations to cover unexpected costs associated with coronavirus reporting. These needs may include, but are not limited to, tools to work remotely, increases in coverage to inform communities and combat misinformation, and other costs associated with serving vulnerable and at-risk communities.

The Facebook Journalism Project is also working with News Media Canada and the Independent News Challenge to advise on how best to reach journalists in remote communities across Canada.

An Uphill Climb

For all of these efforts, a recent piece in Politico underscored how philanthropy’s anti-fake news crusade often resembles a game of Whac-a-Mole. While Facebook has invested millions to purge fake news on its main network, coronavirus-related misinformation is now proliferating on the Facebook-owned WhatsApp “because it is less regulated and allows people to share personal messages with large numbers of people.”

On March 16th, Ireland’s Prime Minister Leo Varadkar went so far as to tweet: “I am urging everyone to please stop sharing unverified info on WhatsApp groups. These messages are scaring and confusing people and causing real damage.”

WhatsApp, to its credit, helps users spot fake news and launched the WhatsApp Coronavirus Information Hub. In partnership with the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the United Nations Development Programme, the hub offers guidance, tips and resources for users to reduce the spread of misinformation.

WhatsApp is also donating $1 million to the Poynter Institute’s IFCN to “help grow the amount of fact-checking organizations on WhatsApp and to support their life-saving work to debunk rumors,” said WhatsApp head Will Cathcart. “We will also continue to work directly with health ministries around the world for them to provide updates right within WhatsApp.”

At this point, some additional context is in order.

In mid-February, Cathcart told the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz that the service would fight to keep its platform encrypted despite pressure from governments and law enforcement to access private chats. Cathcart said that even WhatsApp’s own engineers cannot access its 2 billion users’ private messages. “For all of human history, people have been able to communicate privately with each other, and we don't think that should go away in a modern society.”

We don’t know if Cathcart has changed his tune in the last four weeks. But the implication here magnifies Politico’s findings. Bad actors or well-intentioned users are propagating misinformation about the coronavirus on WhatsApp on a global scale without the company even knowing it. If WhatsApp is powerless to stop it, what chance does philanthropy have?

Maximizing Impact

At the very least, the IFCN/Facebook partnership provides additional evidence that the anti-news crusade will be led by humans. This may sound intuitive until you remember that the funding community has struggled with striking a balance between tech-driven solutions and those guided by less efficient but more intuitive homo sapiens. As anthropologist and computer scientist Danah Boyd noted, an algorithm can’t determine what’s fake, much less grasp the nuances of consumer behavior and ingrained prejudices.

The News Integrity Initiative (NII), a consortium of journalism’s heaviest hitters, including Facebook, launched in 2017 to address this exact challenge. As CUNY journalism school’s Professor Jeff Jarvis said at the time, “We plan to be very focused on a few areas where we can have a measurable impact.”

A few months later, the NII published a human-centric strategic roadmap focused on supporting local news outlets and building community trust. The word “technology” was nowhere to be found. True to form, in early February, the NII awarded the American Press Institute $150,000 to expand its existing newsroom mentorship initiative and help newsrooms create organizational cultures built on community listening.

All of this suggests the NII will accelerate its trust-building efforts to mitigate COVID-19 and 2020 election-related misinformation, right? Not so fast.

The NII’s website currently states that it will “refocus its work” over the next year on “improving diversity, equity and inclusion practices in the news business.” The institute was seeded with $14 million to boost news literacy and increase trust in journalism, and this surprising shift finds it joining other funders working to boost diversity in the newsrooms. To what extent the initiative may revisit this change in the wake of COVID-19 remains an open question.

Finding the Silver Lining

NII’s emphasis on building trust and news literacy infuses the IFCN’s work in combating misinformation about COVID-19. “The fact-checking community has been working very hard, day and night, since January to point out falsehoods about the new coronavirus,” said Cristina Tardáguila, the IFCN’s associate director and the coordinator of the COVID-19 collaborative project. “Social media platforms have a responsibility to combat this type of misinformation; it is great to see that Facebook is willing to support the CoronaVirusFacts Alliance.”

Similarly, WhatsApp’s $1 million to the IFCN will train people to use the advanced features within WhatsApp Business, including the WhatsApp Business API. “Expanding the presence of these IFCN-certified fact-checking organizations could help ensure local communities are aware and responding to potential harmful rumors,” the firm said.

As Inside Philanthropy’s David Callahan recently noted, for all their purported prescience and innovation, funders were caught flat-footed by COVOID-19. The good news—if there’s any good news to be gleaned from recent developments—is that journalism funders have allocated tens of millions of dollars to stem the spread of misinformation over the past four years. They agree that the intuition and expertise of living, breathing humans is more impactful than quick algorithmic fixes. They now have an opportunity to show the world what they’ve learned. (We’re looking at you, Craig Newmark and the Knight Foundation!)

Setting aside the fact that a couple of million dollars is woefully insufficient given the scope of a rapidly spreading global pandemic, the IFCN partnership provides funders and organizations with a roadmap to stemming the tide of misinformation about COVID-19.

In related news, check out Poynter’s guidance about avoiding misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic.

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