Langguth Johannes, Filkuková Petra, Brenner Stefan, Schroeder Daniel Thilo, Pogorelov Konstantin
Department of High Performance Computing, Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, Norway.
Department Data Science and Analytics, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway.
Int J Data Sci Anal. 2023;15(3):329-346. doi: 10.1007/s41060-022-00322-3. Epub 2022 May 27.
The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected the lives of people worldwide, and consequently, it has dominated world news since March 2020. Thus, it is no surprise that it has also been the topic of a massive amount of misinformation, which was most likely amplified by the fact that many details about the virus were not known at the start of the pandemic. While a large amount of this misinformation was harmless, some narratives spread quickly and had a dramatic real-world effect. Such events are called digital wildfires. In this paper we study a specific digital wildfire: the idea that the COVID-19 outbreak is somehow connected to the introduction of 5G wireless technology, which caused real-world harm in April 2020 and beyond. By analyzing early social media contents we investigate the origin of this digital wildfire and the developments that lead to its wide spread. We show how the initial idea was derived from existing opposition to wireless networks, how videos rather than tweets played a crucial role in its propagation, and how commercial interests can partially explain the wide distribution of this particular piece of misinformation. We then illustrate how the initial events in the UK were echoed several months later in different countries around the world.
新冠疫情严重影响了全球人民的生活，因此，自2020年3月以来，它一直占据着世界新闻的主导地位。所以，它也成为大量错误信息的主题也就不足为奇了，这很可能是由于在疫情初期，关于该病毒的许多细节尚不清楚这一事实而被放大。虽然大量此类错误信息并无危害，但一些说法迅速传播并产生了巨大的现实世界影响。此类事件被称为数字野火。在本文中，我们研究一种特定的数字野火：即认为新冠疫情爆发与5G无线技术的引入存在某种关联的观点，这种观点在2020年4月及之后造成了现实世界的危害。通过分析早期社交媒体内容，我们调查了这场数字野火的起源以及导致其广泛传播的发展过程。我们展示了最初的观点是如何源自对无线网络的现有反对意见，视频而非推文在其传播过程中如何发挥了关键作用，以及商业利益如何在一定程度上解释了这条特定错误信息的广泛传播。然后，我们说明了英国最初发生的事件在几个月后是如何在世界不同国家得到呼应的。
