Disinformation and Disease: Social Media and the Epidemic Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Having recently entered the second year, the outbreak of Ebola virus disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continues to challenge national, regional, and international health officials. Since being declared on August 1, 2018, the epidemic has been significantly increased in cases, deaths, and as a threat to neighboring countries. In July, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the outbreak is an international public health emergency.

The reasons why this is an international emergency, which is one of the problems that have been created by the DRC and the lack of support from the international community. Included in the mix of factors is the spread of disinformation through the social media about the Ebola outbreak and responses to it. The context in the DRC has been proven to proliferate of online disinformation about Ebola. Violence associated with the armed conflict, divisiveness in Congolese politics, and skepticism about the intentions of foreigners, with other factors, produced an environment in which "crawling misinformation fuels a distrust of outsiders in medical garb."

Unfortunately, the proliferation of disinformation online amidst the DRC's outbreak is not novel. The biggest Ebola outbreak in history occurred in West Africa in 2014, and those struggling with the crisis and misleading information spread through social media. The online disinformation problem has become just as ubiquitous in health as in other policy areas. Efforts to curb bad information and conspiracy theories on the social media about vaccinations for various diseases to the pervasive scope and pernicious effect of online misinformation on health issues.

Disinformation threatens health because it undermines confidence in the underlying science, questions the motivations of health professionals, politicizes health activities, and creates problems for responses to disease challenges. This disturbing phenomenon is not, however, all about the internet. Outbreaks of disinformation during disease epidemics have long, deep, and disconcerting roots in domestic and international politics.

Domestically, actual and feared outbreaks of disease have been blamed, without justification, on foreign countries or immigrants. In addition, spreading misinformation about diseases is a tactic of disinformation campaigns by governments before the social media era. For example, Soviet propaganda in the 1980s claimed that the United States was responsible for the spread of HIV / AIDS in Africa. Thus, diseases-and the fear of epidemics-have long proved fertile for "weaponized health communication" that exploits anti-immigrant prejudice, xenophobia, politically-polarized populations, and geopolitical competition.

All these features of the disease disinformation playbook have appeared in Ebola outbreaks in Africa. During the 2014 outbreak in West Africa, the Russian internet trolls disseminated information that accused the United States of bringing Ebola to that region. Social media platforms, such as Facebook and WhatsApp, have been used to blame foreigners for the ongoing presence and spread of Ebola in the DRC. Such messages have been made that have been launched by Ebola treatment centers in the DRC as symbols of foreign meddling. Claims that immigrants and asylum seekers threaten to bring Ebola into the United States of America on social media.

The deep political roots of disease disinformation, combined with the social media's effectiveness in spreading false information about outbreaks, has cyber experts, health specialists, and global leaders worried. Cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier argued that, "when the next pandemic strikes, we'll be fighting. . . The deluge of rumors, misinformation and flat-out lies that will appear on the internet. "Heidi Larson of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine warned that the flood of" conflicting information, misinformation and manipulated information on social media should be recognized as The UN Secretary-General asserts that, "the spread of false information poses a threat to people's lives, health and safety to public health systems across the world."

Health organizations, such as WHO, have developed strategies for such disinfections and outbreaks, such as vaccinations. These strategies resemble efforts in other areas to combat disinformation in cyberspace. As Schneier Observed, the health strategies look "like what we're talking about with regard to government-run and other information" , ways to promote official and accurate news, and so on. "

However, the creping of the DRC's Ebola outbreaks of the disease is similar to that of the previous year. Recommending that health organizations devote more time and resources to this challenge. As the DRC 's Ebola crisis shows, outbreak prevention and response efforts under the circumstances of personnel, equipment, medicines, funds, and political will. In such resource-challenged contexts, the brutal triage required to set priorities for controlled outbreaks can be marginalized against the convergence of the politics of disease disinformation and the matchless potential of social media to spread misinformation.