"Trust us. We are the experts": A critical policy perspective on expert meanings of health "misinformation" in the COVID-19 era


Claudia Chaufan, York University

In April of 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) released the report Managing the COVID-19 infodemic: A call to action, declaring that “the 2020 pandemic of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) [had] been accompanied by a massive ‘infodemic.’” Soon afterwards UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres tweeted, also alluding to COVID-19, that “a tsunami of misinformation, scapegoating and scaremongering [had] been unleashed.” The tweet was followed by a March 2021 report from the Centre for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, warning that “health-related misinformation and disinformation” were undermining the public response to COVID-19, and, about a year later, by a Department of Homeland Security infographic, Disinformation Stops With You , alerting about the “risks to democratic institutions” of “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “malinformation” – dubbed MDM and conceptually including “infodemic” - distinguishing these terms based on the presumed intentionality of the agents producing or spreading them. These and similar calls to “manage” any form of discourse produced by individuals or groups skeptical of the “scientific consensus” are emerging from dominant social institutions, and have been paradigmatically captured in a recent report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), dubbed Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms , whose goal is to protect “free, high-quality, and independent media and information tools” to both safeguard “freedom of expression and the right to information” and control the “threat” of “dis- and misinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories.” As per UNESCO, this goal requires “a multistakeholder approach” including partnerships among governments, regulatory agencies, civil society, and digital media platforms. The ambitious nature of this goal notwithstanding, there has been scant critical examination within academia of what social and political institutions and actors spearheading these calls mean by MDM in the COVID-19 context, of the standards against which truth and falsehood of claims should be assessed, and of the implications of the premises underlying these meanings for public policy, equity, and civil, social, and political rights. Drawing from the traditions of critical policy, discourse, and document analysis, we critically review the literature produced by selected dominant social institutions – academic medicine, academic social sciences, and NGOs – by applying Arksey O’Malley’s scoping review framework, enhanced by Levac et al.’s team-based approach. We summarize, and appraise this literature systematically while assessing its implications for the health and well-being of populations affected by policies informed by dominant concepts of MDM. This presentation reports preliminary findings of our investigation.

Non-presenting authors: Camila Heredia, York University; Natalie Hemsing, York University; Jennifer McDonald, York University

This paper will be presented at the following session: