Question 1: Explain some factors that prevent people having access to correct and reliable information about important issues that affect them, such as public health.
Question 2: To what extent has information about COVID-19 been more accessible to citizens of Pacific Island Countries than would have been possible before we had social media?
Please refer to the readings below and also give some in text citations from the readings.
Kant et al. (2021, pp.49-50)
The widespread increase of COVID-19 and the resultant global pandemic has become a focus of intense social media discourse with Twitter reporting a COVID-19 related tweet every millisecond and the hashtag #coronavirus surging to become the second most used in 2020 (Cinelli et al., 2020; Josephson & Lambe, 2020). Unfortunately, false, and misleading information about COVID-19, potentially dangerous treatments, and eventual vaccination continue to grow on social media platforms. 'Infodemic' was the subject of an early COVID-19 study by Cinelli et al. (2020), who used epidemic modelling to the spread of information on multiple platforms to determine fundamental reproduction numbers for the 'transmissibility' of postings on each platform. Additionally, irrespective of platform, there were no significant differences between the disseminating patterns of information considered questionable compared with reliable ones. There is also growing worry that vaccine-related conversations are not confined to legitimate human accounts. Broniatowski et al. (2018) looked at how accounts belonging to robots and trolls (internet accounts that falsify the user's identity and whose goal is to provoke conflict) operate on Twitter.
It is worth noting that the current trends in COVID-19 vaccine discourse bear a striking similarity to historical trends. Vaccine discourse on social media has had time to evolve, with such trends in discourse often coinciding with real-world public health events (Gunaratne, Coomes, & Haghbayan, 2019). For instance, Gunaratne et al. (2019) demonstrated that anti-vaccine discourse on Twitter experienced a significant surge in 2015, coinciding with the 2014-2015 measles outbreak, publication of the anti-vaccine book Vaccine Whistleblower (#cdcwhistleblower), and the release of the film Vaxxed (#vaxxed). It also demonstrates that pro and anti-vaccine content may also naturally disseminate into distinct communities, possibly due to self-selection on social media, further enhanced by online algorithms, amalgamating like-minded communities to contrasting online information and content. For example, anti-vaccine content on Twitter largely coalesced into a community centred around #cdcwhistleblower and #vaxxed proponents, while pro-vaccine content primarily centred around the hashtag #vaccineswork (Gunaratne et al., 2019; Ortiz-Ospina, 2019). Content appears to transfer between users who share similar sentiments regarding vaccination but rarely across those with differing opinions, suggesting the structure of such platforms may give the illusion of debate, but in practice mainly serves to reinforce previously held opinions rather than the consideration of new ones (Yuan, Schuchard, & Crooks, 2019). Such ideological isolation may limit the ability of public health to promote vaccination on social media (Yuan et al., 2019).
Piller et al. (2021, pp.505-506)
Around the world, the exclusion of linguistic minorities from fair and equitable access to social participation, including education, employment, welfare, or health is common (Avineri et al. 2018; Piller 2016a). During a disaster, the availability of timely, high-quality information becomes even more vital, not only for the general public but also health professionals and decision makers at all levels (Xiang et al. 2020). A mismatch between the language in which such information is communicated and the linguistic repertoires of those who need the information serves to exacerbate the effects of disasters on linguistic minorities in comparison to the majority population (Uekusa 2019).
States are not the only actors in our globalized world, and information circulating on traditional and social media emanates from a wide variety of social actors, ranging from media corporations via political parties to large numbers of highly diverse community groups and grassroots efforts. Some of these are specifically dedicated to making public health information available in languages insufficiently served by state actors (e.g., Haimovich & Márquez Mora 2020; Lising 2020; Yu 2020). Others have contributed to an "infodemic", where populations who do not have access to timely, high-quality information are simultaneously being swamped with misleading information (Zarocostas 2020). A combination of language barriers, on the one hand, and low levels of trust in official communications, on the other, have made minority populations particularly vulnerable to misinformation and fake news, as has been found in Dutch (van Liempt and Kox 2020) and European Union (Burke 2020) research.
All these communication challenges matter because individual outcomes have greater influence on the overall course of the COVID-19 pandemic than is the case in most other disasters. As anyone can become a carrier of the virus, prevention and containment efforts minimizing the personal risk of individuals are deeply intertwined with the overall risk to the community.