Flattening the curve: A pandemic for the information age

From the first days in January this year, the question that dominated the outbreak was how upfront Beijing had been about the novel coronavirus that became known as Covid-19. Richard McGregor:

So far, the handling of the crisis seems to have underlined one of the ongoing problems with the authoritarian strictures of the party-state, which places a premium on the control of information in the name of maintaining stability … Could the virus have been contained, and its spread limited, if officials in Wuhan had levelled with both their bosses, and the public, earlier? It is impossible to say, but at the moment, it certainly looks that way.

Still, the warning signs about the rapid spread of the virus – and what would result in more than 1.7 million deaths so far – did not translate into public trust, particularly in already politically stressed Hong Kong. Vivienne Chow:

An unprecedented level of panic is caused not just by fear, but by the lack of trust. Reactions of the people of Hong Kong and the international community are a vote of no confidence in the authorities’ abilities to protect people and contain the virus. Authorities here are not only the Hong Kong and the Chinese governments, but also the World Health Organisation, which is supposed to “lead partners in global health responses”.

Australia began to react with travel restrictions, buying time at a cost to the education and tourist industries, but Dominic Meagher warned “that time must now be used effectively”.

Three things must be done: eliminate panic, develop some form of treatment, vaccine, or cure, and put in place more sustainable policies to slow down the virus.

But by late February politics and prejudice had complicated the response around the world over. Audrey Jiajia Li:

With 28 countries so far reporting confirmed cases of the virus, caution over the mysterious deadly illness is expected and natural. Yet it is important to emphasise that Chinese people are the victims, not the culprits, of this epidemic.

South Korea, Europe, the United States, India and almost everywhere saw spiking rates of infection. The Tokyo Olympics were soon abandoned, Indonesia struggled and Pacific island nations feared the danger as lockdowns spread. Leaders felt the pressure to rise to the occasion. Michael Fullilove:

There has been a lot of discussion about the communications tools, including websites and texts, that governments are employing to speak with their nations about the coronavirus pandemic … The media noise being generated about Covid-19 is deafening – but the single note of a good speech, well delivered, can penetrate it.

And by the end of March, it was increasingly clear the virus would hold momentous consequences for the world. Daniel Flitton. 

The crisis will affect everything in some way, whether budget assumptions, global supply chains, or the trappings of power … drastic change [may be] later assimilated into a “new normal”, the point was still a major readjustment and far-reaching – and lasting – implications not only for the community, but also for relations between nations.

So The Interpreter examined the cross-cutting influence of the virus had on existing international challenges, whether the Hong Kong protest movement, poverty in India or the Philippines, migrant workers in Singapore, insurgency in Thailand, fighting the remnants of Islamic State, conflict in Afghanistan or tensions on the Korean peninsula. The crisis had a disproportionate impact on women, while the cost to the global economy was also manifesting. Roland Rajah:

The social distancing required to slow the virus – both voluntary and mandated by governments – means the economic hit is going to be large, and there’s probably not much that traditional demand-stimulus policies can do to materially counter it. In part, that’s because people won’t go out to spend the money, but it’s also because the virus is an intensifying supply-side shock as well – with big disruptions to normal business activity and many workers pulled out of work, either for health reasons or as workplaces and schools are temporarily shut down.

And if a first step to combating a problem is first understanding it, disinformation and conspiracy online was certainly no help. Natasha Kassam:

The dilution of information on the internet is currently posing a risk to global health and safety. Much like globalisation has extended the reach of the virus, social media has extended the reach of fake news. And the stakes are higher.

Bright spots emerged. Enterprising Indonesians mixed their own hand sanitiser, and Bob Kelly – aka BBC Dad – had some helpful advice for those staring at a Zoom meeting working from home:

This will be a slog for the next several months, and my guess is that for all the convenience of telework, most people will enjoy going back to an office when this situation finally breaks.

Nick Bisley wondered at the future power dynamics in Asia. Mark Beeson asked what the crisis might hold for the vaunted international order?

Any of the big issues that collectively confront us – including climate change, economic disadvantage, and, of course, controlling pandemics – would seem to necessitate some form of institutionalised international collaboration.

Countries raced to develop vaccines while wrestling with the rights to privacy when tracing the virus spread. The future design of cities was questioned, we wondered about spies and the warning signs, protecting political leaders from the virus or whether they could strike a global bargain to do better next time?

Jennifer Hsu charted the growing power China’s Xi Jinping amid the pandemic, while Erin Hurley watched Donald Trump shrivel before the challenge. Meantime, Stephen Howes urged the world to remember those most vulnerable:

Covid-19 is hitting at a time when the number of displaced people is at its highest since the end of the Second World War. What if the virus takes hold in a massive refugee camp in Africa, the Middle East or Asia?

Should the world have been better prepared? Shahar Hameiri:

Used to financing and implementing limited interventions far from home, developed states’ governments were suddenly fighting huge contagions on the home front, for which they were often poorly prepared. And since very limited collective capacity had developed previously, their full focus immediately turned inwards, thus producing a fragmented, “zero-sum” response globally.

Or did the world overreact? Ramesh Thakur:

Health professionals are duty-bound to map the best- and worst-case scenarios. Governments bear the responsibility to balance health, economic and social policies. Once these are included in the decision calculus, the political and ethical justification for the hard suppression strategy is less obvious.

Perhaps, in the end, planning doesn’t matter. Gordon Peake and Christian Downie:

Magnified exponentially by these last few weeks, there seems something both absurd yet strangely comforting about feeling emboldened enough to guess a course for endpoints years away … [looking back] planning documents are proof-positive of that old Yogi Berra maxim that the most difficult thing to predict is the future.

Let’s see in 2021 if nature cares that humans can count in years.

Main image via Flickr user 7C0

Australia experienced two major emergency events in 2020 – the summer bushfires followed shortly after by the coronavirus pandemic. Throughout these events, social media played a critical role in providing information, facilitating social connection and public discussions.

However, there was also a deluge of mis- and disinformation, often spread through coordinated networks. A worrying and persistent element emerged within such networks – extremist messaging by inauthentic accounts that exploited emergency events to magnify their content and recruit followers.

In early January, I tracked a set of 300 fringe, hyper-partisan Twitter accounts that were pushing the #ArsonEmergency hashtag. I was initially alerted to their activity due to automated bot and troll detection tools, which showed a significantly higher proportion of suspicious activity compared to other hashtags. This hashtag, which parodied the popular hashtag #ClimateEmergency, was the centrepiece of a discredited campaign that arson, and not climate change, was the cause of the bushfires.

In this network I observed a worrying amount of problematic content that bumped up against, and in some cases went over, the margins of hate speech, racism and incitement to violence. The example above shows a tweet of an unsubstantiated claim that a “man of Asian descent” was lighting fires – notably, it includes the hashtags #DomesticTerrorism and #ShootToKill. This is an attempt to legitimise the use of violence against particular sub-groups, which fits alongside other baseless claims that other groups such as environmentalists and Muslims were conspiring to light bushfires on purpose.

It is no surprise that Twitter has since suspended one in 20 prominent accounts in this #ArsonEmergency network. The figure below shows the follower network for these accounts, filtered to focus on the most prominent nodes (accounts with more than 20 in-links or “follows” from other accounts). Suspended accounts are shown in red (6% of total), deleted accounts are blue (5% of total), and active accounts are white (89%).

Echoes of this #ArsonEmergency and extremist activity were also observed in the United States during the wildfires in Oregon and Washington during September. False rumours circulated on social media that left-wing “antifa” activists were deliberately lighting fires, which led to armed right-wing vigilante groups threatening people in rural communities. The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon debunked these rumours and pleaded with citizens to follow official information in order to enable authorities to deal with the fires and minimise loss of life and property damage.

A concerning trend among the #ArsonEmergency account network was the promotion of platforms which are less constrained by content moderation such as Parler and Gab. A number of accounts actively try to recruit people to “free speech” platforms that allow more extremist content, such as far-right and QAnon conspiracy theories (QAnon is now heavily moderated on Twitter). Indeed, QAnon has been labelled as a domestic terror threat in the US, given its advocacy of violence and its anti-Semitic attitudes.

The example below shows the profile of the most active account posting #ArsonEmergency tweets, including a link to Parler and a call-to-action: “Find me on Parler”.

This marketing of alternative platforms aligns with recent concerns that content moderation on major platforms is driving users to self-moderated platforms that are echo chambers of extreme and hateful content. In this way, far-right Twitter networks in Australia are co-opting crisis and emergency events as a staging ground for radicalising individuals into groups such as QAnon. In the process, these accounts weaponise Twitter’s content moderation policies as “evidence” of their conspiracies, using it to drive traffic onto self-moderated platforms where extremist messaging finds safe harbour.

Shortly after the Australian bushfires, the Covid-19 pandemic provided unprecedented opportunities for far-right extremist groups such as QAnon to evolve and spread their messages and networks. In Australia, the pandemic was swiftly politicised and social media activity polarised into a hyper-partisan battleground.

The Victorian “second wave” outbreak provides an illustrative case study. Both social and mainstream media were polarised into two camps: those who supported Victorian Premier Dan Andrews’ handling of the outbreak (the #IStandWithDan tweeters) and those who opposed it (#DictatorDan and #DanLiedPeopleDied).

During the various stages of Victorian coronavirus restrictions, social media became a vector to foment anti-lockdown sentiment and protests, culminating in violent clashes with Victorian police. At the same time, Sinophobic memes of Dan Andrews circulated on Twitter and Facebook, keying into racist narratives and hashtags that conflate Chinese identity with the virus. Indeed, the #DanLiedPeopleDied hashtag is a memetic play on the problematic hashtag #ChinaLiedPeopleDied, which features alongside Sinophobic hashtags such as #WuhanFlu and #ChinaVirus.

This online activity was contextualised by an increase in racist attacks and slurs against Asian people both in Australia and globally. Extremist messaging was not solely directed at ethnic minorities. Female journalists also received abuse from a small but vocal core of extremist pro-lockdown activists, including abhorrent threats of physical and sexual violence.

More research is needed to understand how emergency events are co-opted by extremists to push problematic content and build their networks. How successful are these cross-platform recruitment strategies from Twitter to platforms such as Parler and Gab? We still have no idea how big and/or active such cross-platform networks are, so mapping these and understanding their dynamics is critical.

Similarly, how can researchers develop better methods to detect when hyper-partisan organic networks are infiltrated and co-opted by extremists? The distinction is often subtle and requires temporal analysis of large-scale data combined with careful qualitative close reading and digital forensics.

Finally, we need renewed efforts to advocate for better data access for researchers and transparency from social media companies. Public health and safety are directly proportional to the health and accountability of our social media ecosystems.
 

This article is part of a year-long series examining extremism and technology also available at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, of which the Lowy Institute is a core partner.

In Malaysia earlier this month, it was reported a woman had been nabbed by the police for spreading false information relating to a supermarket closure in the northern state of Penang. Her alleged crime? A Facebook post which read:

The suspected case at Flat Tuna has been confirmed positive. The patient went shopping at Billion, Bandar Sunway. Billion has been closed until a date to be announced later for sanitisation.

This was one of at least 260 investigations opened since January into Covid-19–related false information by the Royal Malaysian Police (PDRM) and the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), the country’s content regulator. As of July, 17 people had gone through trial and been found guilty, another 13 were in the midst of trial, with 30 more charged and 12 warning notices issued, while the remaining cases were still under investigation.

Notably, PDRM and MCMC have been issuing public warnings since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic not to spread unverified information. In lieu of the now-repealed Anti-Fake News Act 2018, the authorities are giving teeth to their warnings with legislation such as Section 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 and Section 505(b) of the Penal Code.

The former makes the “improper use of network facilities” an offence, while the latter criminalises “statements conducive to public mischief”. Ostensibly, this is meant to impose punitive costs to creators of false information and deter would-be creators, while fostering awareness of how creating and perhaps even sharing false information is an offence under the law.

At face value, this strategy seems to be working. On 11 June, Ismail Sabri Yaakob, who heads internal security and non-health-related efforts in Malaysia’s fight against Covid-19, announced that neither the PDRM or MCMC had opened any new investigation related to Covid-19 fake news for the period of 28 May to 11 June. According to Ismail, “this shows that public awareness has increased over the importance of not sharing fake news”.

Beneath the surface, however, issues relating to the apparent success of the Malaysian government in dealing with false information about Covid-19 are evident.

 

The first and most obvious relates to the authorities’ reliance on the vaguely worded, broadly applicable sections of the law. Besides placing the bar ridiculously low for content to be illegal if it causes annoyance to another person, the fact that it was passed in the 20th century, predating the modern typology of false information, means that it does not – by design – distinguish between the challenges as understood today.

For example, the differences between “misinformation”, which is essentially false information spread through an honest mistake, “disinformation”, defined as deliberately created false information to deceive or mislead, and “malinformation”, referring to deliberately created false information to cause harm, are not reflected in the legal provisions.

This means that ostensibly innocent intentions, such as an effort to warn friends to be extra cautious during this pandemic, could lead to a person being found guilty under the law.

The second issue relates to the government’s feeble attempt to address false information about Covid-19 through its public information campaigns. While there have been periodical reminders for the public not to share unverified information, coupled with catchy slogans such as “tak pasti, jangan kongsi” (“not sure, don’t share”) and “pastikan sahih” (“ensure its verified”), these should only be seen as the bare minimum.

Even the government’s more valiant efforts in the form of fact-checking ­– spearheaded by Sebenarnya.my, the government-operated one-stop centre for debunking false information, and the Quick Response Team, established in March to rapidly verify any viral news – will, unfortunately, be hamstrung as merely reactive measures.

This points to the third issue – which is arguably at the root of the problem: the lack of efforts to equip the public with the digital literacy skills that are necessary to filter the large amount of information that can be gained on the internet.

These digital literacy skills refer to basic practices such as cross-referencing sources of information to check its veracity, reverse image-searching photos to see if they have appeared elsewhere in a different context, or spotting telltale cues in photos and/or videos that could help identify when and where they were made.

While not foolproof, such skills would better allow people to spot false information, which could then reduce the number of times it is forwarded on to a larger audience. If people are not equipped with these skills, it is hard to imagine how the public could inculcate a habit of fact-checking information.

And without these skills, society is left vulnerable to being misled about the dangers of the virus. Worse still, when coupled with the government’s reliance on vaguely worded, broadly applicable legislation to deal with false information during the pandemic, ordinary people who merely want to share information risk running afoul of the law.

It is only natural that during this time of heightened anxiety people will want to share information that they feel could be beneficial or helpful to others. The Malaysian government ought to rethink why the onus is placed on the public to not spread false information when they could, genuinely, not have known any better.

Celebrity sells – it always has. But in the digital age, the boundaries of celebrity have changed. Once it was the prerogative of movie, sports or music stars to front a fashion label or promote perfume. But nowadays the marketplace is saturated with any number of online lifestyle and wellness “influencers”, social media users who by virtue of their taste, niche expertise or marketing savvy develop audiences of thousands – sometimes millions – who seek to emulate their lifestyle.

And promoting products is only the beginning. Such influencers can have a profound effect in imparting attitudes and beliefs, too.

Most of the time, this is harmless, a new thread in the media milieu. Yet at a time of pandemic, where medical advice is heavily contested and conspiracy theories from the dark reaches of the internet have proliferated, some online lifestyle influencers are amplifying misinformation and disinformation.

In a new twist during the Covid-19 crisis, three formerly distinct online ecosystems – those occupied by lifestyle/wellness influencers, “QAnon” conspiracy believers, and violent extremists – have in some instances become intertwined, through shared conspiracy-related hashtags and wild claims about the dangers of vaccines, 5G and the evils of the “deep state”. 

Numerous recent studies and news reports have shown that extremist groups are exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic in an attempt to justify their narratives, recruit followers or incite violence. Extremist narratives have always contained strong conspiratorial elements, and this time is no different. Coronavirus-related conspiracies are deftly interwoven through extremist narratives and mobilisation efforts.

But the connection with online lifestyle and wellness influencers marks a change. This crossover came about after some online lifestyle and wellness influencers became entrepreneurs of conspiracy theories, using them to boost their profiles and to promote and validate their views of wellness. One of the more dangerous conspiracies promoted by  lifestyle/wellness influencers are QAnon conspiracies.

The QAnon movement has its origins in the so-called “pizzagate” conspiracy of 2016. In its current form, QAnon alleges that there is a US government insider with a “Q-level clearance” who is communicating cryptically with his followers online. QAnon followers believe there is a “deep state” within the US government that is controlled by a cabal of Democrats and liberal Hollywood celebrities who are also Satan-worshiping paedophiles. Through Q, President Donald Trump was manifested to expose and shut down these ritualistic paedophile rings. During the Covid-19 pandemic, QAnon conspiracy groups and posts have also promoted the idea that the pandemic was, alternately, another deep-state plot, a hoax, and a Chinese bio-weapon, among other health disinformation.

However, QAnon is not only a conspiracy movement. It has also been deemed a domestic terror threat by the FBI. A leaked FBI memo written in May 2019 assessed QAnon believers as “conspiracy-driven domestic extremists” and that QAnon and other crowd sourced conspiracies would “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity”.

The memo cited two violent incidents linked to QAnon, but there have been at least three other violent incidents since its publication, with researchers also examining its spread beyond the United States. What started as a US-based pro-Trump conspiracy movement has now gone global and includes a number of proponents in Australia, reportedly including a family friend of the Prime Minister with a substantial social media following.

 

A recent article by Insider magazine highlighted a number of lifestyle influencers who were posting QAnon conspiracies related to the pandemic. Outlets such as Buzzfeed, Mother Jones and Huffington Post have also revealed a string of other popular lifestyle, design and wellness influencers who have become vectors of Covid-19 and QAnon conspiracies. Some have latched onto the discredited “plandemic” film released in May or QAnon memes, variously claiming the coronavirus is fake, or that the deep state is responsible for spreading the virus, or that pandemic lockdown measures are a tool of oppression. Still others have encouraged followers to attend anti-lockdown protests which have included a number of far-right extremists in their midst. 

Ironically, one of the most widely shared erroneous memes about the virus being spread by people in China eating bat soup, which was created and circulated by conspiracy theorists and extremists alike, was itself appropriated from a Chinese online influencer and celebrity vlogger, who said that a video of her eating a local delicacy of bat soup in Palau for her vlog was “hijacked by accounts fanning out malicious panic”.

The intersection between wellness and violent conspiracies seems unexpected, but the wellness movement has its origins in anti-establishment and anti-mainstream medical circles. Scholars such as Charlotte Ward and David Vaos have examined the confluence of new age wellness and conspiracy, which they termed “conspirituality”, an intersection between new age wellness, belief in the dangers of a “new world order” and big pharma, and a shared emphasis on “awakening” and revealing truths.

Until recently, the convergence of wellness and conspiracy in a drive for awakening and societal change emphasised the non-violent and the peaceful. However, the emergence of the QAnon movement has pushed things in a more troubling direction.

The online links between far right, QAnon conspiracy groups and some online wellness and lifestyle influencers have grown during the pandemic, the ensuing lockdown and response to restrictions. Online wellness and lifestyle influencers who peddle QAnon conspiracy theories about the pandemic can potentially drive traffic to online extremist groups through shared QAnon related hashtags such as #QAnon, #TheGreatAwakening, #Plandemic, #GermJihad, #MAGA, #whitegenocide #WWG1WGA or #coronavirushoax. This can also be done when influencers have used memes and iconography also appropriated by right-wing extremists – for example “red pill blue pill”, “falling down the rabbit hole”, or “where we go one we go all”.

More analysis is needed, but there is emerging evidence to suggest that online influencers’ posts related to QAnon are being cross-posted and referenced by extremists groups on online forums. And by promoting conspiracies or “alternative” information in the name of wellness and alternative lifestyles, the online influencers of today can serve, however unwittingly, as a gateway directing users to further, darker corners of the internet.

 

Social media lifestyle influencers posting about QAnon not only serve to normalise this fringe movement, but can potentially undermine efforts by internet companies to “de-platform” purveyors of disinformation, label misleading posts and weed out prohibited content (as identified in their terms of service). Internet companies such as Reddit have banned QAnon forums for inciting violence. Facebook has banned a number of QAnon pages for inauthentic behaviour ,and Apple has removed a QAnon app from its store. Twitter recently announced it is suspending thousands of QAnon accounts. But QAnon posts still flourish online.

Because lifestyle and wellness influencers generate substantial revenue, have helped build social media businesses, and have not generally intersected with extremist movements before, there is a danger that influencers will escape extremist content reporting and moderation. Furthermore, influencer posts are likely to reach a wider audience than extremist group posts as they are less scrutinised by social media mechanisms monitoring extremist content.

Lifestyle and wellness influencers are particularly challenging because, as numerous surveys have found, influencer marketing has exploded. More and more people are turning to influencers and online personalities for inspiration, recommendations and purchasing advise. Online influencers who’ve latched onto QAnon present conspiracies in an engaging, appealing and relatable manner, often interspersing posts promoting QAnon among stylised photos of fashion, workouts and recipes. The same skills that these influencers use for consumer brand marketing have helped turn an outlandish conspiracy theory into an “acceptable option in the market place of ideas”.
 

A expanded version of this article is available at Global Network on Extremism and Technology of which the Lowy Institute is a core partner. This article is part of a year long series examining extremism and technology.

A spike in coronavirus cases across Melbourne has seen local hotspot suburbs largely locked down and some 3000 people in public housing towers prevented from leaving home at all. But the sharp reminder that “This is not over” which now flashes on freeway signs across Australia’s second largest city has been accompanied by evidence of another disturbing problem during the pandemic – the cost of conspiracy theories in muddling public health messages.

The Victorian government has been on a testing blitz in a bid to contain the virus, with almost 200,000 tests conducted in the past week. Yet some 10,000 people refused a test. Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos said some had declined believing that coronavirus was a conspiracy, with the effects overstated, or simply with a misguided faith that it would not affect them.

Some misunderstanding should be expected. After all, this is still a new virus scientists are grappling to understand, and symptoms range from barely noticeable to deadly. That local medical systems have coped better than had been feared in the early stages of the pandemic might also foster some complacency.

But misinformation and disinformation is proving a challenge, even for Australia, with a trusted public broadcaster and a robust democracy. None of this is helped by world leaders whose countries have endured the highest rates of infection and deaths have written off the virus as a minor illness or even a hoax. And news sources are varied. More Americans, for example, now get their news from social media than from print newspapers, and ongoing closures of newsrooms may drive individuals to online sources without similar editorial standards which allow for the greater sharing of unchecked messaging.

This challenge is linked to a change in Australia’s extremist threat environment, which has been dominated by Islamist violent extremism in recent years. ASIO’s annual threat assessment released in February outlined the threat of right-wing extremism as “real and growing”. A June update revealed that right-wing extremist investigations now make up a third of ASIO’s domestic caseload, with a warning that far-right groups are using Covid-19 as a cover to push ideologies and recruit. The potency of this mix of beliefs was manifested in rallies around Australia in May, with protesters calling Covid-19 a scam and protesting against vaccines, pharmaceutical companies, fluoride and 5G, which has been falsely claimed as a cause of Covid-19 with tenacity on social media.

This unlikely, awkward mix of fringe groups has seemingly become greater and more influential than the sum of its parts. Numbers remain small, but not inconsequential. Data demonstrates that the virus can only be controlled when 8 out of 10 people adhere to social distancing measures, yet a small, concentrated number of people who do not could have a significant effect on this virus’ R (reproduction) number. The lockdown of nine public housing towers in Melbourne over the weekend was justified by health authorities on grounds that even a small number of infections unchecked poses an unacceptable risk.

This indirect, seemingly non-deliberate threat to public health varies considerably from the traditional threats faced from extremist groups. However, disinformation as a threat to democracy remains a concern. There was one case of an attempt to use Covid-19 disinformation to influence this weekend’s federal by-election in Eden-Monaro, with the Australian Federal Police charging one Sydney man who orchestrated spam emails falsely linking Labor candidate Kirsty McBain to the coronavirus pandemic.

Activities to counter disinformation are taking place at the federal level. A new taskforce has been established within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to counter disinformation, with a focus on authoritarian states using disinformation to sow fear and division in democracies. This threat was reiterated in Australia’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update, which highlighted better preparation to respond to “grey zone” activities in the Indo-Pacific, including disinformation. The Australian government has been working with the tech sector to counter the prevalence of hate speech, extremist content and misinformation online.

But even with this public-private sector commitment solidified in the Christchurch Call, this strategy has been acknowledged as a game of whack-a-mole with more material ready to appear and influence as soon as it can be taken down. To further complicate matters, the Eden-Monaro case demonstrates the risk of misinformation being spread by local individuals instead of authoritarian states.

The debate as to where responsibility for online disinformation lies is an ongoing one. However, a new development may force the hands of social media companies, whose platforms allow for the greatest dissemination and amplification of conspiracy theories and disinformation in an increasingly social media-connected world. Stop Hate For Profit is an American private sector–led campaign to cancel advertising on Facebook in response to allegations of allowing incitement to violence amid the Black Lives Matter protests. Organisers’ demands include human rather than automated responses to hateful material, including creating an internal mechanism to automatically flag hateful content for human review and enabling individuals facing hate and harassment to connect with live employees. Facebook receives 98% of revenue – nearly $70 billion in 2019 – from advertising. If this campaign succeeds in forcing social media companies to better prevent disinformation on racial inequality, there may be potential to also counter disinformation on Covid-19, given this pandemic’s devastating social and economic impacts.

As the world struggles with the Covid-19 crisis, the US and China have been locked in a heated propaganda warfare over the handling of the virus. Hitting back at President Donald Trump’s claim that “China let it spread”, Chinese official media angrily accused the US of “groundless accusation” and “nefarious plotting”. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian’s twitter post incited an equally unsubstantiated claim that the virus was a bioweapon of the US military.

Amid this public condemnation, conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns, an unconventional animation video released by the state news agency Xinhua stood out in China’s propaganda arsenal.

Featured in Lego figures taking part in a play act, the one-and-a-half-minute video suggestively entitled “Once upon a virus” presents a series of interactions over Covid-19 between China and the US, represented by a group of terracotta warriors and the Statue of Liberty. The video opens with a mask-wearing warrior informing World Health Organisation (WHO) of a “strange pneumonia case”. The ensuing conversation takes place between the warriors, all equipped adequately with masks and hazmat suits, and the “bare” Statue of Liberty.

“We discovered a new virus”, the warriors say. “So what? It’s only a flu”, the Statue of Liberty replies. “Wear a mask”, “don’t wear a mask”, “stay at home”, “it’s violating human rights”, “build temporary hospitals”, “it’s a concentration camp” are the back and forth lines along which the debate develops.

The Statue of Liberty constantly defies whatever the warriors say and hence is portrayed as undermining the efforts of fighting the virus, while China’s advice and “achievements” are underlined. As the Statue of Liberty is too busy engaging in this war of words, her condition worsens. The video ends with her eventually wearing a mask and being attached to an intravenous drip, still blaming China and insisting that “even when we contradict ourselves, we are always correct”, to which the warriors ironically retort “That’s what I love about you Americans, your consistency”.

Three aspects of this video are important to highlight: communication strategy, symbolism of content and targeted audience. China’s sarcastic and light-hearted effort of fixing its already-damaged reputation stands in sharp contrast to the party-state’s previous approaches in conducting foreign propaganda, defined generally by charm offensive on the one hand and “fire and fury” on the other. Solemnity, dignity and formality are hailed as the rule of thumb of conducting politics in Chinese culture and are in turn reflected in propaganda materials.

The party-state tends to distance itself from such political satire, reflected in one of the Global Times editorials response to South Park’s innuendo of Xinjiang’s detention of Uighurs as “knowing too little about China”. This time, however, China seems to be at ease to use some stereotyped charges against it, such as “violation of human rights” and “concentration camp”, as an irony to vindicate itself. While China presents the charges the US put forward, it does so in a way that portrays them linked to the Covid-19 policy in the US, making it easier to highlight the flaws and contradictions within both.

China’s willingness to engage with the criticisms received sits in stark contrast with traditional propaganda approaches of denial and reaffirmations of its own positions which generally paid little attention to what the interlocutor had said. The Xinhua video instead of bluntly reiterating the official position or all of governments’ arduous efforts so far, sarcastically ridiculed the US for engaging in a “blaming for blaming’s sake” game.

Markedly, China did not use more internationally renowned images such as a panda or dragon to represent itself. The choice of terracotta warriors symbolises the eternal power of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of unified China endorsing legalism as the official state doctrine. In his lifetime, he used his military might to brutally conquer neighbouring territories; in his afterlife, the 8,000-warrior terracotta army was meant to protect his emperorship into perpetuity. Adopting this symbol, China might imply that its draconian measures of effectively containing the virus are the manifestation of the disciplined Qin’s rule under legalism; parallels with President Xi Jinping’s rule, with lifted restrictions on his mandate and characterised by a harsh clampdown on critics and an aggressive foreign policy inevitably come to mind.

The Statue of Liberty is equally symbolic. Its “liberty enlightening the world” is mocked for its reverse effect in times of crisis, implying that human lives are traded for “liberty”, and as a consequence the freest country in the world is now the worst hit by the virus. Moreover, all characters are made from Lego parts which is ironic given the company’s controversial decision back in 2016 of not fulfilling Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s order due to concern that the bricks will be used to make a political statement; in line with its apolitical stance, the company denied any involvement in the production of this video.

The video, produced in English, was not disseminated by domestic media but targeted a foreign audience. Nonetheless, it was picked up by Chinese social media, recording over 11 million views since 2 May.

We can only suspect that the state is cautiously sounding out the public’s reactions on such undertakings. This would be in line with Xi’s administration interest in combining information technology with propaganda. In 2013, a video called “How Leaders Are Made”, similar to “Once upon a virus” in style, though far less sarcastic in tone, showcased how high-profiled politicians raise to power in China and the West. The production studio “Fuxing Road” (复兴路上) remained a mystery, though some lined it back to CCP’s International Department.

For now, it remains to be seen whether China is truly turning a new creative page in its propaganda manual.

Governments around the world are working hard to convince their populations to download the various Covid-19 infection tracing apps. As well as potentially helping to stymie the spread of the virus, the app download numbers serve another purpose: they could be read to indicate how much trust there is in government. With the apps containing potentially sensitive personal data about millions of people, it comes as little surprise that there is growing concern over privacy and how this data will be used, post-pandemic.

In Australia, the COVIDSafe app has been downloaded, according to the most recent figures, almost six million times. That number, while large, falls far short of the government’s desired 40% of the population. It’s an indication that, for all of the recent opinion polls showing high approval ratings for Prime Minister Scott Morrison, there still isn’t much public faith in the government to ring-fence the data.

Conversely, in India, the tracing app Aarogya Setu (“bridge to health”) has been downloaded more than 100 million times and was the seventh most downloaded app worldwide in April (less than TikTok, but more than Netflix). Even in a country of 450 million smartphones, it is significant. Authorities are also releasing a version of the app that works on the next 100 million mobile phones that are internet-enabled. The figures underscore Modi’s ongoing popularity and the public trust in his governance.

100 million users on Aarogya Setu. Together we can fight COVID19.
Download Aarogya Setu and Stay Safe.#IndiaFightsCorona #SetuMeraBodyguard#AatmanirbharBharat pic.twitter.com/V619c44nSz

— Aarogya Setu (@SetuAarogya) May 12, 2020

Still, there has been significant disquiet over the app’s features, which critics say undermines Indians’ privacy. The great fear is that the Indian government is using the pandemic and the app as cover for scaling up its moves towards becoming a surveillance state. The government announced it was mandatory for all state employees to download it. It has been made compulsory in a number of other settings, including throughout Noida, a satellite city to New Delhi, and for rural migrant workers travelling by train. No other democracy has made it mandatory for citizens to download the app.

Aarogya Setu, like most contact tracing apps, relies on Bluetooth. But it also uses GPS tracking, meaning that that each user’s location is tracked multiple times each day. Critics say this is unnecessary and excessive, and they fear that the app could be used to create permanent government databases with sensitive personal information about Indian citizens.

One of the voices is French ethical hacker Robert Baptiste, going by the moniker Elliott Alderson, who points out that the internal database is easily accessible, meaning anyone can see who is sick anywhere in India. He has called on the government to make the source code public, so independent researchers can fully understand the technology. 

Separately, an analysis of the app conducted by French cybersecurity consultancy Defensive Lab Agency found that it has the probable capacity to access other features on the smartphone on which it is installed, such as the microphone, contacts and system settings.

And a comparative review published by MIT Technology Review gave the app two out of five stars, losing points for lacking transparency and not being voluntary. (COVIDSafe rated four out of five stars, with concerns around its lack of transparency.)

To its credit, the Indian government appears to be listening, issuing a rare Twitter rebuttal of Alderson’s claims, yet on Sunday backtracking on the mandatory download conditions, instead strongly urging employees and employers to take it up. While its moves towards a surveillance state have been well-documented, it appears the government has realised that now is perhaps not the best moment to try to exploit the public mood, even though fearful populations are generally happy to cede ground on privacy and liberty in favour of safety.

While another chief complaint, that of India’s lack of data privacy legislation is also being addressed with a bill awaiting approval in parliament, there is genuine cause for concern, given that India’s moves towards building a surveillance infrastructure did not begin with Aarogya Setu.

Five years ago, the Aadhar number was introduced, a program which gave each citizen a unique 12-digit number that the government said would streamline bureaucracy and ultimately help poor people access welfare. But the Supreme Court in 2018 placed strict limits on the use of the program, in response to growing public concerns over privacy and whether the data was being used correctly. 

More recently, the Modi government has been finalising a database tracking “every aspect of the lives of each of India’s 1.2 billion residents”. According to a report in Huffington Post India in March, the so-called National Social Registry would track every time someone moved cities, changed jobs, bought property or even lost a family member. While authorities have claimed that the NSR would “ensure greater administrative convenience by converging resources and efforts”, deep concerns about privacy abound. Opponents say the data collated could be used to target specific communities, and even individuals. And yes, the database (or integrated set of databases) would be based on the Aadhar number, drawing a line between the two.

With this in mind, now is a good time for Indians to remain vigilant: after all, India’s legacy of using emergencies to invoke special powers does have a dark past.

Coronavirus-related cyberattacks have proliferated since the first Covid-19 cases emerged in Wuhan, China. According to a recent Microsoft analysis, every country in the world has now experienced at least one such cyberattack, with the number of successful intrusions increasing daily. In a heightened state of confusion and stress, security gaps stemming from human vulnerabilities, such as email scams and unmonitored malware intrusions, have inevitably escalated.

A variety of tactics and techniques have been observed. Attacks have ranged from unsolicited bulk spam emails aiming to spread disinformation or instigate scams, malicious domain names resembling legitimate sources, mobile apps that can be used for eavesdropping, or phishing attempts to steal private information. Sometimes, these techniques are used in conjunction with malware embedded within interactive Covid-19 maps, or ransomware that encrypts and prevents the use of a system until a payment is received.

Such cyberattacks are not unique to this pandemic ­– capitalising on human vulnerabilities, particularly during major events, is a fundamental aspect of cyber threats. Malicious actors commonly use social engineering techniques to manipulate individuals to do something against their best interests. For example, phishing attacks have sought to take advantage of job duties (“Please read attached COVID-19 guidelines”), or even financial needs (“Click this link to view our FREE financial support guide”). Such vulnerabilities can also be exacerbated by a lack of adequate guidance from employers, especially at a time when oversight may be reduced due to staff and operational reductions, or during a rapid transition to remote working.

While most coronavirus-related cyberattacks amount to mere annoyances, others have had serious consequences. Essential services, including the healthcare sector, have become prime targets. The Brno University Hospital, a Covid-19 testing laboratory in the Czech Republic, was a victim of ransomware cyberattacks. In the US, multiple cyberattacks on pharmaceutical and medical research organisations compromised corporate networks through their supply chains.

Hackers have also quickly followed the shift towards remote technology, with multiple security flaws being exploited within remote-work application Zoom, creating surveillance and data privacy concerns. Amid the growing economic fallout from coronavirus, social security services have also been successfully hacked, such as those in Italy, illustrating the ability of malicous actors to rapidly adapt to the changing landscape.

 

While the motiviation is often criminal, sometimes, it can reflect geopolitical intent. Various state-sponsored “Advanced Persistent Threat” (APT) groups have been observed in attempts to exploit the pandemic to disrupt operations, steal intellectual property, and gather intelligence. Multiple phishing and spam cyberattacks against organisations in Ukraine, South Korea, and Vietnam were shown to have traces of state-sponsored APT groups from Russia, North Korea, and China respectively. Some APT groups have also sought to specifically target government services. For example, Vicious Panda, an allegedly Chinese-affiliated cyberespionage campaign by the Calypso Group, sent documents containing the RoyalRoad malware to individuals in the Mongolian public sector, masquarading as the Mongolian Ministry of Foreign Affairs disseminating information about Covid-19. Such malware would have allowed them to take screen shots, execute new processes, and collect system information as part of a suspected broader intelligence operation against a variety of other governments and organisations.

Several implications can be drawn from patterns in such cyberattacks. State-sponsored APT groups have predominantly focused on targeting organisations and governments in their regional spheres of influence, despite some having an international portfolio of operations. Essential services should expect to continue to be a target of coronavirus-related cyberattacks. Along with the healthcare scctor, financial services and industries that provide manufacturing, logistics, and cloud integration platforms could face an intensification of attacks on related supply chains as they become increasingly vital in a pandemic environment. This is especially worrisome considering cyberthreat reports before the pandemic had already pointed to the likely escalation of cyberattacks on similar sectors.

Furthermore, irrespective of any ethical boundaries which might be expected during a pandemic, hackers have had no compunction in flouting international cyber regulations, subsequently overwhelming enforcement capabilities. This amounts to a further warning with elections forthcoming in the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, and elsewhere of the lengths to which state-sponsored APT groups might use cyberattacks during major political events to influence and/or infiltrate foreign societies and governments.

It can also be expected that disinformation campaigns will intensify amid the current coronavirus-related “infodemic”. A recent Fireeye report found that many Covid-19–related themes aimed at Russian or Ukrainian audiences were in fact part of “Sekondary Infection,” a Russia-based disinformation operation. In some cases, efforts in manipulating social narratives are supported by cyberattacks, to reinforce political positions domestically and abroad – while others could also simply result from questionable decision-making, elevating unconfirmed rumours and circulating inaccurate information. Concurrently, by fostering chaos in social discourse, malicious actors capitalise on the environment of confusion, indirectly enhancing the effectiveness of cyberattacks while damaging mitigation efforts.

Effectively countering cyberattacks that leverage off similar major events requires preparedness and adaptability from the targeted organisation. It is crucial to understand that the primary vulnerability is people themselves, as gatekeepers to the security of any systems. The imperative for key decision makers is therefore to integrate the human aspect of cybersecurity into risk management frameworks, for the time of Covid-19, and beyond.

If the 15th-century philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli were alive today, he would surely have recognised the power of surveillance technologies that states such as China, Singapore, South Korea, and others have adopted in the fight against Covid-19. Patrol robots and drones, CCTV cameras and smartphone applications, all supporting facial recognition, location tracking, and big-data analytics for contact tracing and social control (including law enforcement). These things may be tools for protection, but they are also instruments of fear.

In the effort to persuade people to comply with counter-pandemic measures, fear of state punishment has perhaps played a greater role than fear of the loss of privacy and civil liberties. But people are also fearful of sacrificing privacy and civil liberties as a result of tech-enabled mass surveillance expanding state power.

The threat of inadequate data protection adds to these fears, even if experts claim that rapid implementation of these technologies is necessary against the smart virus that is the cause of Covid-19. In Australia and Singapore, for example, commentators have suggested that downloading national contact-tracing applications Covidsafe and TraceTogether should be made mandatory.

Civil-rights advocates contend that the use of surveillance technologies should be time-limited and cease when the pandemic is brought under control. There are also concerns that the use of surveillance technologies to fight Covid-19 resembles China’s authoritarianism and thus implicitly enhances its soft power.

Given, however, that these technologies are so new, and the virus and its socioeconomic impact are evolving and expected to linger for years, states have an opportunity to assess how to use these surveillance tools. Here are four strategic considerations:

• Surveillance technologies are not a silver bullet. They can supplement manual contact tracing. These technologies are effective because manual contact tracing cannot keep up with how quickly the virus spreads through densely populated cities. Like many tools, these technologies are neutral. They can be used responsibly (i.e., for enhanced security) or they can be misused (for monitoring, repression, and control). Dismantling surveillance technologies after the pandemic has passed will not be so easy – it’s akin to demobilising an army after the battle, hoping that war (or a pandemic, in this case) will never recur.
• Nothing is risk-free. Everything is about risk management. Beneath the fear of loss of privacy and civil liberties is a global decline of trust in state institutions and elites. The potential for the state to exploit its power for parochial political gains instead of protecting citizens’ interests looms in the minds of many. The Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrated that people cannot trust the private sector to protect their data from manipulation. There is a need to rethink the notions of trust and risk, instead of perceiving them in binary, zero-sum terms.
• Increased use of surveillance technologies might make states less democratic and more tolerant of China’s authoritarianism. This concern is more of a geopolitical construct. An overemphasis of the dangers of China's authoritarianism can overlook how other powerful states have disregarded human rights in the use of technology. Ultimately, the decision to adopt new surveillance technologies needs to a strike a difficult balance between legitimate privacy concerns and guarding public health and the economy.
• Covid-19 highlights challenges that will likely render multilateralism less effective in addressing global crises. Even in the face of common threats to humanity, states are more inclined to put self-interest before the collective good. The war of words between China and the US over the virus’s origins fuels geopolitical distrust and uncertainty, impairing international cooperation and global leadership. More states will be poised to pursue self-reliance to avoid being caught flat-footed in the future.

Such considerations point to a future where tech-enabled state surveillance becomes an unstoppable global trend. Covid-19 may be a turning point that causes states to make tougher choices to better prepare for both man-made and biological threats. Public health unpreparedness has already resulted in severe harm to national interests. Keeping people safe and economies functioning is fundamental for a state’s political legitimacy.

Nonetheless, states must acknowledge that concerns over privacy and civil liberties will continue to characterise the post-pandemic zeitgeist. They therefore need to demonstrate how surveillance protects citizens, not only institutions and elites. They will also have to address the socioeconomic inequalities that Covid-19 has exposed.

There will always be those who question official motives. For this, our time-travelling Machiavelli also had some advice: It is better to be feared than loved, if one cannot be both.

Chaos is a ladder, said Littlefinger in Game of Thrones. Crisis is an opportunity, Sun Tzu didn’t say in The Art of War. Either way, in the United States, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and “infodemic”, political chaos is a clear and present danger, and an opportunity, in the covert and overt information wars between America and China.

Media reports citing US intelligence sources and think tanks suggest that China has identified the schisms in American politics as openings they can and should exploit. Disinformation campaigns involving Chinese operatives amplified phony news stories, such as an apparently imminent threat that the US government was sending troops onto the streets to support a national shutdown.

The how and why of this is important: they offer lessons in the vulnerabilities of any society to these sorts of online disinformation campaigns, as well as revealing the motivations of who might be running them.

Awaiting further proof, it is important to consider these campaigns may be state-directed, or could be the products of a more loosely coordinated network of Chinese online actors, such as identified by ASPI’s Cyber Policy Centre, or something else. But enough is known about the nature of these campaigns to characterise how they work and why they are attempted.

Motivations first. Why might China engage in these types of information wars? For one, it fits with the model of the “three warfares”, which includes public opinion alongside legal and psychological warfare. Information wars were not invented recently, but China has learned the lesson from Russia’s efforts in 2016 in the US and elsewhere and seen how they work.

Information wars serve two purposes for the Chinese military, who, we must remember, firstly serve the Chinese Communist Party, rather than the Chinese nation.

The first purpose is to buttress the CCP from internal pressure. There are significant and legitimate questions being asked about the response of Chinese authorities to the coronavirus outbreak, hence the need to turn up the volume on the standard narratives that both undermine Western (specifically American) systems of politics and present the outside world as antagonistic to China’s rise, sometimes referred to as Chinese “negative soft power”. This is not new.

The second purpose is to support efforts to diminish US influence internationally and thereby reduce American capacity to curtail China’s activities on the global stage. This is accompanied by a more confrontational approach by Chinese diplomats on social media and signals a greater confidence in its position and, perhaps, its national brand.

That is the why. What about the how? Fortunately for disinformation warriors, much of the hard work has been done for them.

Disinformation campaigns work best where several criteria are met.

The first is a large, connected online community of interest, which provides a network effect, spreading disinformation far and fast. As in epidemics, so in viral media. Super spreaders can greatly enhance the virality of a message, so those with significant influence (through network position or cultural and political importance) can exacerbate matters.

The second is a population sufficiently distrustful of authority, especially politicians and mainstream media. American political discourse meets both criteria easily: President Trump and his cheerleaders act as super spreaders and promote distrust in political and media elites (while being elites themselves).

The third relates to what is known as “crisis infomatics”: situations of high anxiety and low certainty which are conducive to the spread of both disinformation (deliberative, by malicious actors) and misinformation (uncoordinated, by well-meaning actors unwittingly spreading false hope). The Covid-19 pandemic is distinct in that uncertainty has been high for much longer than typical of other emergencies, such as a terrorist attack, mass shooting, or large-scale disaster.

Lastly, disinformation content is more spreadable if it is more emotive. Righteous anger is effective. It also helps if it has some level of homespun “truthiness”, as opposed to institutional authority. American nativist populism feeds on anger and rates folksy axioms over science. Such circumstances lead to soaring reproductive rates for viral conspiracy theories.

These factors are well known and have been exploited by foreign actors seeking to disrupt American politics and society since at least 2016. All combined, they demonstrate that the online media environment in the US is ripe for disinformation campaigns and is a product of local conditions, not a creation of foreign actors.

Worse, the limited efforts by tech giants against coordinated inauthentic campaigns are increasingly ineffective, as malicious actors can either amplify community-based campaigns on social media, or they can use encrypted messaging and SMS services. Neither of these are easily tracked.

All this remains the case despite the recent efforts to limit the spread of misleading Covid-19 information. The tech giants remain deeply opposed to similar checks on online political falsehoods.

For Australia, the grim lesson is that the online communications environment shares many of same characteristics that make the US vulnerable. There is little prospect of that changing.

But a happier conclusion arises out of the relatively sensible and sober discussions that have so far characterised Australia’s response to Covid-19. By quarantining misleading rumours to the outer fringes of political discourse, and presenting policy led by medical and scientific expertise, there is less occasion for malicious actors to turn chaos into opportunity.

This hard lesson should be remembered and applied beyond the times of Covid-19.