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Study Finds ‘Single Largest Driver’ of Coronavirus Misinformation: Trump

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Cornell University researchers analyzing 38 million English-language articles about the pandemic found that President Trump was the largest driver of the “infodemic.”

WASHINGTON — Of the flood of misinformation, conspiracy theories and falsehoods seeding the internet on the coronavirus, one common thread stands out: President Trump.

That is the conclusion of researchers at Cornell University who analyzed 38 million articles about the pandemic in English-language media around the world. Mentions of Mr. Trump made up nearly 38 percent of the overall “misinformation conversation,” making the president the largest driver of the “infodemic” — falsehoods involving the pandemic.

The study, to be released Thursday, is the first comprehensive examination of coronavirus misinformation in traditional and online media.

“The biggest surprise was that the president of the United States was the single largest driver of misinformation around Covid,” said Sarah Evanega, the director of the Cornell Alliance for Science and the study’s lead author. “That’s concerning in that there are real-world dire health implications.”

The study identified 11 topics of misinformation, including various conspiracy theories, like one that emerged in January suggesting the pandemic was manufactured by Democrats to coincide with Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, and another that purported to trace the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China, to people who ate bat soup.

But by far the most prevalent topic of misinformation was “miracle cures,” including Mr. Trump’s promotion of anti-malarial drugs and disinfectants as potential treatments for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. That accounted for more misinformation than the other 10 topics combined, the researchers reported.

They found that of the more than 38 million articles published from Jan. 1 to May 26, more than 1.1 million — or slightly less than 3 percent — contained misinformation. They sought to identify and categorize falsehoods, and also tracked trends in reporting, including rises in coverage.

For example, on April 24, a day after Mr. Trump floated — and was ridiculed for — the idea that disinfectants and ultraviolet light might treat Covid-19, there were more than 30,000 articles in the “miracle cures” category, up from fewer than 10,000 only days earlier. Mr. Trump drove those increases, the study found.

To those who have been watching Mr. Trump’s statements, the idea that he is responsible for spreading or amplifying misinformation might not come as a huge shock. The president has also been feeding disinformation campaigns around the presidential election and mail-in voting that Russian actors have amplified — and his own government has tried to stop.

But in interviews, the Cornell researchers said they expected to find more mentions of conspiracy theories, and not so many articles involving Mr. Trump.


Public health experts know that clear, concise and accurate information is the foundation of an effective response to an outbreak of infectious disease. Misinformation around the pandemic is “one of the major reasons” the United States is not doing as well as other countries in fighting the pandemic, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a former principal deputy commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration.
“There is a science of rumors. It’s when there is uncertainty and fear,” said Dr. Sharfstein, who teaches on public health crisis communications. In the absence of treatments or vaccines, he said, honest and consistent messaging is essential.
“This is what we need to save lives,” he said. “If it’s not done well, you get far more infections and deaths.”
The Cornell Alliance for Science, which spearheaded the study, is a nonprofit devoted to using science to enhance food security and improve environmental sustainability. One of its aims is to promote science-based decision-making. Dr. Evanega and a Cornell colleague, Mark Lynas, partnered with media researchers at Cision, a company that performs media analysis, to conduct the study. Dr. Evanega said the study was being peer reviewed by an academic journal, but the process was lengthy and the authors withdrew it because they felt they had compelling public health information to share.
The researchers sought to identify all mentions of misinformation in “traditional media” — including in The New York Times and other major news outlets. They included fact-checking articles that corrected misinformation in their total tally. But fact-checking articles accounted for only 16.4 percent of those that included misinformation, “suggesting that the majority of Covid misinformation is conveyed by the media without question or correction,” the authors wrote.
The study found that conspiracy theories, when lumped together, accounted for 46 percent of the misinformation mentions. Among those theories was one that emerged in early April suggesting that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a respected voice on the pandemic, was exaggerating deaths or was a beneficiary of pharmaceutical company efforts to find treatments and vaccines. To look for such stories, they examined social media hashtags, including #FireFauci and #FauciFraud.

The researchers identified more than 11,000 misinformation articles involving Dr. Fauci, as compared with more than 295,000 involving miracle cures. There were more than 40,000 articles that mentioned the purported Democratic hoax, and more than 6,000 mentioning bat soup, which was the topic of a video that made the rounds on social media in the winter.



The Study.
 
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In other Cornell news, their bubble seems to be holding up nicely.

0.01% positivity rate, entire student body tested once or twice weekly

this past 7 days: 5 positive tests among about 34,000 people tested
 
Cornell University researchers analyzing 38 million English-language articles about the pandemic found that President Trump was the largest driver of the “infodemic.”

WASHINGTON — Of the flood of misinformation, conspiracy theories and falsehoods seeding the internet on the coronavirus, one common thread stands out: President Trump.

That is the conclusion of researchers at Cornell University who analyzed 38 million articles about the pandemic in English-language media around the world. Mentions of Mr. Trump made up nearly 38 percent of the overall “misinformation conversation,” making the president the largest driver of the “infodemic” — falsehoods involving the pandemic.

The study, to be released Thursday, is the first comprehensive examination of coronavirus misinformation in traditional and online media.

“The biggest surprise was that the president of the United States was the single largest driver of misinformation around Covid,” said Sarah Evanega, the director of the Cornell Alliance for Science and the study’s lead author. “That’s concerning in that there are real-world dire health implications.”

The study identified 11 topics of misinformation, including various conspiracy theories, like one that emerged in January suggesting the pandemic was manufactured by Democrats to coincide with Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, and another that purported to trace the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China, to people who ate bat soup.

But by far the most prevalent topic of misinformation was “miracle cures,” including Mr. Trump’s promotion of anti-malarial drugs and disinfectants as potential treatments for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. That accounted for more misinformation than the other 10 topics combined, the researchers reported.

They found that of the more than 38 million articles published from Jan. 1 to May 26, more than 1.1 million — or slightly less than 3 percent — contained misinformation. They sought to identify and categorize falsehoods, and also tracked trends in reporting, including rises in coverage.

For example, on April 24, a day after Mr. Trump floated — and was ridiculed for — the idea that disinfectants and ultraviolet light might treat Covid-19, there were more than 30,000 articles in the “miracle cures” category, up from fewer than 10,000 only days earlier. Mr. Trump drove those increases, the study found.

To those who have been watching Mr. Trump’s statements, the idea that he is responsible for spreading or amplifying misinformation might not come as a huge shock. The president has also been feeding disinformation campaigns around the presidential election and mail-in voting that Russian actors have amplified — and his own government has tried to stop.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/books/to-make-their-own-way-in-world-zealy-daguerreotypes.html?action=click&algo=top_conversion&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=true&imp_id=10699486&impression_id=46c817b2-03e3-11eb-b640-37dc672f36ab&index=2&pgtype=Article®ion=ccolumn&req_id=530610037&surface=home-featured&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending

But in interviews, the Cornell researchers said they expected to find more mentions of conspiracy theories, and not so many articles involving Mr. Trump.


Public health experts know that clear, concise and accurate information is the foundation of an effective response to an outbreak of infectious disease. Misinformation around the pandemic is “one of the major reasons” the United States is not doing as well as other countries in fighting the pandemic, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a former principal deputy commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration.
“There is a science of rumors. It’s when there is uncertainty and fear,” said Dr. Sharfstein, who teaches on public health crisis communications. In the absence of treatments or vaccines, he said, honest and consistent messaging is essential.
“This is what we need to save lives,” he said. “If it’s not done well, you get far more infections and deaths.”
The Cornell Alliance for Science, which spearheaded the study, is a nonprofit devoted to using science to enhance food security and improve environmental sustainability. One of its aims is to promote science-based decision-making. Dr. Evanega and a Cornell colleague, Mark Lynas, partnered with media researchers at Cision, a company that performs media analysis, to conduct the study. Dr. Evanega said the study was being peer reviewed by an academic journal, but the process was lengthy and the authors withdrew it because they felt they had compelling public health information to share.
The researchers sought to identify all mentions of misinformation in “traditional media” — including in The New York Times and other major news outlets. They included fact-checking articles that corrected misinformation in their total tally. But fact-checking articles accounted for only 16.4 percent of those that included misinformation, “suggesting that the majority of Covid misinformation is conveyed by the media without question or correction,” the authors wrote.
The study found that conspiracy theories, when lumped together, accounted for 46 percent of the misinformation mentions. Among those theories was one that emerged in early April suggesting that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a respected voice on the pandemic, was exaggerating deaths or was a beneficiary of pharmaceutical company efforts to find treatments and vaccines. To look for such stories, they examined social media hashtags, including #FireFauci and #FauciFraud.

The researchers identified more than 11,000 misinformation articles involving Dr. Fauci, as compared with more than 295,000 involving miracle cures. There were more than 40,000 articles that mentioned the purported Democratic hoax, and more than 6,000 mentioning bat soup, which was the topic of a video that made the rounds on social media in the winter.



The Study.


They get paid for this crap.
 
Again if you take the death rate of a place like Germany and apply it to us, we'd have over 150,000 people still with us.

Why is that? Does Germany have some sort of advantage over us? Absolutely not.

They unified and smarted up.

They locked down, masked up and used social common sense.

In other words they had clear messaging from their leadership.

We have had a clusterf#$k of leadership. Mixed messaging and massive politicizing of it.

I probably say this every other week but a crisis tends to be good for political leaders. One it's so effing obvious that it's easy to unify the country. Two voters tend to be wary of changing leadership during a crisis.

Trump has spectacularly stepped on his dick over this that it hurts him.

That's an astonishing level of incompetence.
 
Lesson to be learned ...a U.S. president's statements are heard around the world and repeated over and over.

Thus a president should be extremely careful in offering opinions. This is especially true if he doesn't know what he is talking about.
 
The Corona Virus is all Trump's fault! He should be in prison for murder!!

Am I doing this right?
 
Germany's leader is a scientist (degree in quantum chemistry). Ours is a reality TV buffoon.
trump_cycle_5.png
 
They get paid for this crap.
And thankfully we paid these researches to expose corrupt incompetent con men like Trump.
The Corona Virus is all Trump's fault! He should be in prison for murder!!

Am I doing this right?
Oh he might go to prison for something other than murder. This is the reason he’s so desperate to win the election and is willing to destroy democracy by fighting the results all the way to the SCOTUS.
 
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The Corona Virus is all Trump's fault! He should be in prison for murder!!

Am I doing this right?
No, you're obviously an idiot. To do it right first STFU then start listening to your betters. Going through life as a slack jawed fact free rube does you no favors.
 
No, you're obviously an idiot. To do it right first STFU then start listening to your betters. Going through life as a slack jawed fact free rube does you no favors.
Using the term "betters" incredibly loosely here, also the amount of irony in your post is astounding.

Even worse that it's coming from arguably the biggest dumbass on this board (and that's saying a lot).
 
Using the term "betters" incredibly loosely here, also the amount of irony in your post is astounding.

Even worse that it's coming from arguably the biggest dumbass on this board (and that's saying a lot).
Cool story, Cletus ...
 
The Corona Virus is all Trump's fault! He should be in prison for murder!!

Am I doing this right?
No. You only have one job and that's to do the two things your fearless leader Covid-45 has commanded you to do: 1) catch the virus to help reach a certain number to achieve herd mentality and prove him right, and, 2) go into polling places and standby. Those are your only uses to him. I bet you fail him and let him down on both counts
 
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No, you're obviously an idiot. To do it right first STFU then start listening to your betters. Going through life as a slack jawed fact free rube does you no favors.
So says the bigot!
 
This guy just never learns. Now we know why he went bankrupt 4-6 times.

210,000 deaths later or equivalent to the number of combatant deaths in the Civil War....

 
LOL. This maskademic is BS. I go to work everyday. I have attended HS football games. I go to stores to buy groceries and home depot to buy supplies for home projects, Best Buy to get electronics. I don't see people not wearing masks.

Der Biden and his Nazi Demos. What are they going to do, send out their Gestapo militarized local police to attack those in minority neighborhoods who are not wearing a mask or maybe they will target the homeless.

Oh wait, I am wrong. I just saw a jogger who is at 100 feet away from anyone else not wearing a mask. Call the Gestapo.

I didn't think the Trump wall idiocy could be Trumped but here we are.
 
LOL. This maskademic is BS. I go to work everyday. I have attended HS football games. I go to stores to buy groceries and home depot to buy supplies for home projects, Best Buy to get electronics. I don't see people not wearing masks.

Der Biden and his Nazi Demos. What are they going to do, send out their Gestapo militarized local police to attack those in minority neighborhoods who are not wearing a mask or maybe they will target the homeless.

Oh wait, I am wrong. I just saw a jogger who is at 100 feet away from anyone else not wearing a mask. Call the Gestapo.

I didn't think the Trump wall idiocy could be Trumped but here we are.
dumb ..........
 
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