My 75-year-old mother was at home alone in Sri Lanka when she heard the news around a possible nationwide lockdown at the height of the first wave of Covid in 2020.
My mother immediately called up my sister in a heightened state of agitation, worried about how she could manage if all the shops were closed and a curfew imposed.
My sister, in turn very worried about what she heard and the health of our mother, hurriedly got through to me in Dunedin.
The source of this chain reaction was a call my mother had received.
A close relative had passed on a rumour received over WhatsApp. I quickly ascertained that the information wasn’t accurate and was able to comfort my mother.
However, by the time the government got around to denying the rumour, I had already debunked it several times for others. All of them had received the misinformation over WhatsApp or had learnt about it from a telephone call.
Though I have closely studied misinformation’s generation, spread and harm for many years, this was the first time my mother’s health was directly impacted by something she was told that wasn’t true.
The personal is also a more significant political problem.
Adult literacy in Sri Lanka hovers around 92%, the second-highest for South Asia.
However, very few critically question the media they consume.
This leads to an unusual risk, wherein a highly literate population is also increasingly susceptible to misinformation with the advent of social media.
For example, it’s common to forward WhatsApp messages by appending “forwarding as received”, indicating that the sender hasn’t really checked the veracity of what’s shared but is sending it around in case there’s a nugget of truth.
Light-heartedly referred to as the “Uncle and Aunty networks”, an older demographic, not on Facebook or Twitter, frequently share stories using instant messaging apps with family and friends, mapping to digital media cultural practices that are very old and deeply ingrained in society.
Many elders using instant messaging or email groups forward the content received or call others to share what they get: Muscle memory to forward WhatsApp messages plays as much a role as SMS and telephone calls in Sri Lanka’s misinformation landscape.
As such, it’s impossible to talk about misinformation without grounding it in country, context, culture and community.
In many Asian societies, for example, truth is secondary to trust, something that Western scholars often struggle to grasp.
When an older family member shares information, especially about something that no one else knows much about, it is taken to be truthful and often shared among younger siblings.
To question an elder is seen as disrespectful and impolite, so even if what’s shared doesn’t sound quite right, silence wins over scrutiny. In the context of a pandemic, this entrenched offline context is inextricably entwined with online content sharing.
To this end, “The Edge of the Infodemic” report, recently released by the Classification Office, maps the challenges posed by misinformation in Aotearoa growing at pace.
In short, the growing use of social media results in increasingly complex challenges, including through the production and promotion of pernicious content around the pandemic.
The question is, how best to address this harm.
Misinformation is a socio-political offshoot that resists technocratic solutions. Online harms instrumentalise and amplify an offline context in Aotearoa where racism, persistent denial of Te Tiriti, the violent othering of Maori and ostracising minorities exists, and, too often, goes unquestioned.
Put another way, misinformation is not unlike Johnson grass, classified in Aotearoa as an unwanted organism. What’s observable above ground as a weed is, in fact, nourished by roots that serve to spread the harm. Cut off just the visible, and the roots survive and continue to thrive.
Similarly, addressing misinformation requires a high-touch approach, meaningfully engaging communities and those at risk instead of technocratic solutions, performative legislation and cosmetic regulation.
Though I worry about misinformation’s potential impact on my mother, I am relieved she reaches out to my sister and me before taking any action around what she hears.
A government’s duty of care to citizens is not unlike how family looks after each other.
The strongest guardrails against misinformation’s harms may lie in cultivating a more cohesive society.
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First published in NZ Stuff, on 1 September 2021.