Covid hoaxes are using a loophole to stay alive—even after being deleted | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/30/1000881/covid-hoaxes-zombie-content-wayback-machine-disinformation
Pandemic conspiracy theorists are using the Wayback Machine to promote ’zombie content’ that avoids content moderators and fact-checkers.
by Joan Donovan archive page
April 30, 2020
PHOTO BY CHRIS HALL ON UNSPLASH
Since the onset of the pandemic, the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy’s Shorenstein Center, where I am the director, has been investigating how misinformation, scams, and conspiracies about covid-19 circulate online. If fraudsters are now using the virus to dupe unsuspecting individuals, we thought, then our research on misinformation should focus on understanding the new tactics of these media manipulators. What we found was a disconcerting explosion in “zombie content.”
While the original page failed to spread fake news, the version of the page saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine absolutely flourished on Facebook. With 649,000 interactions and 118,000 shares, the engagement on the Wayback Machine’s link was much larger than legitimate press outlets. Facebook has since placed a fact-check label over the link to the Wayback Machine link too, but it had already been seen a huge number of times.
There are several explanations for this hidden virality. Some people use the Internet Archive to evade blocking of banned domains in their home country, but it is not simply about censorship. Others are seeking to get around fact-checking and algorithmic demotion of content.
When looking for more evidence of hidden virality, we searched for “web.archive.org” across platforms. Unsurprisingly, Medium posts that were taken down for spreading health misinformation have found new life through Wayback Machine links. One deleted Medium story, “Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret,” violated Medium’s policies on misleading health information. Before Medium’s takedown, the original post amassed 6,000 interactions and 1,200 shares on Facebook, but the archived version is vastly more popular—1.6 million interactions, 310,000 shares, and still climbing. This zombie content has better performance than most mainstream media news stories and, yet it only exists as an archived record.
Perhaps the most alarming element to a researcher like me is that these harmful conspiracies permeate private pages and groups on Facebook. This means researchers have access to less than 2 % of the interaction data, and that health misinformation circulates in spaces where journalists, independent researchers and public health advocates can not assess or counterbalance these false claims with facts. Crucially, if it weren’t for the Internet Archive’s records we would not be able to do this research on deleted content in the first place, but these use cases suggest that the Internet Archive will soon have to address how their service can be adapted to deal with disinformation.
Hidden virality is growing in places where Whatsapp is popular because it’s easy to forward misinformation through encrypted channels and evade content moderation. But when hidden virality happens on Facebook with health misinformation, it is particularly disconcerting. More than 50% of Americans rely on Facebook for their news, and still, after many years of concern and complaint, researchers have a very limited window into the data. This means it’s nearly impossible to ethically investigate how dangerous health misinformation is shared on private pages and groups.
All of this is a threat for public health in a different way than political or news misinformation, because people do quickly change their behaviors based on medical recommendations.
#Fake_news #Viralité #Internet_archive #zombie_content #Joan_Donovan