Midinformation, journalist arrests in India and Youtube bans
We hope you are having a good morning, afternoon or evening, wherever you are! This week we've got updates for you on journalist arrests in India and a new term for groundtruths that don't exist yet. There's also news on a "war room" that arms Black and Latino voters against U.S. election disinformation and a ban on thousands of accounts by Youtube.
We're also hosting an episode of Meedan's new show, Misinfodemia, today with Dr. Roopan Gill, and we'll be talking all things COVID-19 and women. Dr. Gill is a World Health Organization Medical Officer with the Maternal and Perinatal Health, Preventing Unsafe Abortion team. Join us at @heymeedan on Instagram!
Your COVID-19 questions
Journalist and medical doctor, Dr. Seema Yasmin shares weekly highlights from Meedan's public health journalism tool, learnaboutcovid19.org.
Do positivity rates show herd immunity has been reached?
Dr. Seema says: "Test positivity rates refer to the proportion of COVID-19 tests that come back positive. So in Mississippi, for example, where the test positivity rate is 24%, that means for every 100 COVID-19 tests conducted, 24 come back positive. (This is a whopping number. For context, the World Health Organization suggests that a region consider reopening only when the test positivity rate is 5% or less for 14 straight days.)
Test positivity rates are a useful measure of how much the virus is spreading in an area and the rates can be used for making decisions about things like school re-openings. But this metric alone does not help us assess herd immunity, which is the proportion of people that need to be immune (either through natural infection or vaccination) to a disease before the population is safe from outbreaks. That’s because there are still unanswered questions about what immunity to COVID-19 really looks like, including: how much antibody do you need to have in your blood, which kinds of antibodies, and how long do immune responses need to persist in order to protect you from infection?
Test positivity rates are helpful for tracking outbreaks and identifying disease hotspots—as well those areas that are getting things under control. Test positivity rates and overall numbers of tests being done each day are often inversely correlated with those states doing massive amounts of daily testing recording very low test positivity rates (some less than 1%)." (Read more on what our experts say here)
Should we wipe down groceries, except for produce and such of course, with disinfectant before bringing inside a house?
Dr. Seema says: "In the early months of the pandemic, and perhaps especially after the U.S. president dangerously alluded to the possible injecting of bleach as a way to kill the new coronavirus, calls to poison control centers increased by 20%, and in some parts of the U.S. calls to poison control centers more than doubled. A recent CDC study found that during the pandemic, one third of respondents washed food with bleach, applied household disinfectants to their skin, and intentionally inhaled or ingested cleaning products. On August 5th, the agency warned Americans not to drink hand sanitizer after reports of methanol poisonings. Do not ingest or apply household cleaning products to your skin. It’s best to wash produce as usual and to wash hands after handling packaging that’s been brought into the home from outside." (Read more on what our our experts say here)
Can gasoline or diesel be used to disinfect masks, surfaces, or even skin? What are potential dangers, if any, in doing so?
Dr. Seema says: "As PPE demand has increased during the pandemic and PPE supply chains continue to be challenged, people are reusing masks meant for one-time wear and seeking new ways to disinfect PPE. Disinfectants are in short supply in some areas and gasoline and diesel have emerged as ways to clean masks and even skin. Gasoline exposure to the body can be extremely harmful, even lethal. When applied to PPE, these chemicals can degrade and weaken the materials meant to protect the wearer from the virus." (Read more on what our our experts say here)
Top stories
India arrests dozens of journalists in clampdown on critics of COVID-19 response (The Guardian)
India faces an increasing trajectory in COVID-19 cases, and now the government is clamping down on media coverage critical of its handling of the pandemic. More than 50 Indian journalists have been arrested or had police complaints registered against them, or been physically assaulted. The majority of those facing action are independent journalists working in rural India, home to more than 60% of the 1.35 billion population.
“In a country where half-truths circulate over social media – in some cases spread by politicians – and dubious remedies have been pushed, the government argued before the supreme court that “fake news” triggered the exodus of day labourers from the cities. The court directed the media to “refer to and publish the official version about the developments.”— Danish Raza, The Guardian
Missing information, not just misinformation, is part of the problem (Meedan)
We know that misinformation, disinformation and misinfodemics are all fixtures of our online communication world. Last week, Meedan's COO wrote about how gaps in collective knowledge can impact our information environments create a problems that may sit outside of any existing definitions:
"It turns out that the framework of mis- and disinformation has a basic assumption that doesn’t always apply in the case of COVID-19: the idea that there might be a ground truth, somewhere, at some point, that someone might have in some situation. As I’ve written before, the process of consensus-making requires a negotiation of truth through trusted parties and sources (and therefore subject to the rules of trust, emotion and relatability). But what if the information we’re trying to discuss isn’t known by anyone?" — An Xiao Mina, Meedan
What’s new at Meedan
Book Talk: How to Handle a Crowd with author Anika Gupta
How to Handle a Crowd is the perfect book for anyone looking to take their small community group to the next level, start a career in online moderation, or tackle their own business’s comments section. Join How to Handle a Crowd author Anika Gupta in conversation with Memes to Movements author An Xiao Mina about her new book, published by Tiller Press.
Training the next generation of journalists to field dangerous claims
There is a growing global need for a generation of journalists who can help the public root through the noise of the internet and get to the bottom of the chaos. More than just a baseline need for journalism and high quality reporting (which is equally critical and proactive), the failures of governments, platforms and information leaders during COVID-19, coupled with the public’s growing skepticism of science, call for more of us to be able to spot midinformation and misinformation, discern its different manifestations, debunk claims online, and spread the message. We are hoping to address these challenges through Check U, a new vertical at Meedan that trains university students to spot and verify misleading information.