Coronavirus, conspiracies and cries of election fraud marked 2020 as the year of the infodemic. But the worst may be yet to come

Bill Gates became a supervillain, arson was blamed for catastrophic bushfires and dead people were said to have cast votes in the US presidential election: never before has there been a year so polluted by misinformation as has 2020.

When the director-general of the World Health Organisation declared in February that the world was fighting not just a pandemic but also an “infodemic”, it was not immediately clear just how prophetic that statement would prove to be.

Across more than 50 editions of CoronaCheck (our weekly email newsletter, subscribe here) and myriad fact checks and fact files, RMIT ABC Fact Check has rigorously debunked false and misleading claims made by public figures and politicians, and by anonymous posters to social media platforms.

Just in case you’ve forgotten (or wilfully blocked it out), we’ve cast our minds back over the biggest misinformation stories of the year.

Social media set ablaze with bushfire misinformation

In early 2020, before COVID-19 reached our shores, a wave of misinformation was already breaking across Australia.

As the country burned through Black Summer, debate raged as to the cause of the conflagration, and to what extent global warming was playing a role in an extended fire season and intensifying infernos. Accusations that arson had reached a new extreme took hold online and among conservative politicians and media.

However, Fact Check found there was no evidence that arson had reached “unprecedented” levels, with authorities in Victoria and NSW pointing to lightning as the cause of several major fires. Bushfire experts told us that, regardless of how the fires started, hotter, drier conditions had exacerbated their impact.

At least some of the misinformation was part of a coordinated effort to spread false narratives as to the cause of the fires, with researchers at the Queensland University of Technology finding that Twitter bots utilising the hashtag #ArsonEmergency pushed claims that arson, rather than climate change, was chiefly to blame for the catastrophe.

Daniel Angus, an associate professor in digital communication at QUT, added that right-wing media and politicians were also complicit in “promoting myth and superstition and misinformation” about the fires.

“Arson is a convenient frame to divert attention from the elephant in the room, which is climate change,” he said, noting that the same types of misinformation reappeared later in the year when wildfires raged in the US.

The infodemic

COVID-19 misinformation began its pervasive assault on our social media feeds from the outset of the pandemic with suggestions that the virus was a bioweapon (created by either the US or China, depending on who you asked).

As case numbers rose and the virus spread throughout the world, so too did fabricated claims about potential treatments and cures for COVID-19.

Anne Kruger, the director of First Draft in the Asia Pacific, told Fact Check the “scale of health misinformation was phenomenal on a global scale — be it remedies and cures shared in closed apps amongst families and friends or the US President amplifying the same misinformation from his own privileged platform”.

Indeed, from tonic water to colloidal silver, from hot baths to hot tea, anyone and everyone seemed to know of something that just might work. US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, posited that disinfectant or UV light injected into the body could be the answer the world was looking for.

Hydroxychloroquine, the drug which remains “strongly discouraged” as a COVID-19 treatment by Australian authorities, was also touted by Mr Trump (who claimed to be taking it) and is still being pushed by Coalition backbenchers Craig Kelly and George Christensen.

Meanwhile, Clive Palmer, who purchased millions of doses of the drug, was found by Fact Check to have made a baseless claim when he suggested hydroxychloroquine was responsible for Australia’s low COVID-19 death rate.

Perhaps it was the boredom of home confinement sending people loopy, but lockdowns imposed in order to contain the virus, especially in Victoria, provided the perfect fodder for wayward speculation.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott, for example, was found by Fact Check to be wrong at the time when he said Victoria’s restrictions were the “most severe” in the world.

Claims from anti-lockdown groups online included particularly pervasive (and unfounded) suggestions that case numbers and death tolls were being inflated in order to impose harsh lockdowns as a means of controlling the population.

Members of such groups went so far as to take to the streets throughout the year, including in Melbourne during stage 4 restrictions, with many bemoaning what they argued was the suppression of their human rights, while others carried signs hinting at a COVID “hoax”.

One protester, interviewed by Fact Check intern Nicolas Zoumboulis, said: “We don’t even know anyone who has COVID-19, and if you’ve got doctors and nurses who have got no work to do, how real can it be?”

Misinformation about the accuracy of COVID-19 tests shared online by the groups undermined mass-testing efforts in Victoria during the dark weeks of winter when the state was recording hundreds of new cases of the virus per day.

On testing, Fact Check umpired a state-versus-state stoush between Victoria and NSW over which had the higher testing rate, with Victoria coming out on top (at the time, the state had the fourth-highest daily testing rate in the world).

Also widely spread by those anti-lockdown groups: pernicious claims, featured prominently in the viral “Plandemic” video, suggesting public figures including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci were involved in a global conspiracy either to reduce the world’s population or to use mass vaccination as a cover for implanting microchips in people.

And who could forget the alleged role of 5G technology in spreading the virus?

As Dr Angus, of QUT, pointed out: “The 5G conspiracy theory became the one that everybody knew about.”

Anti-vaxxers had a bumper year, too, spreading claims that the routine flu vaccine would make people more likely to catch coronavirus or, conversely, raise a false positive in a COVID-19 test.

As for the COVID-19 vaccine, claims recently circulating that the jab messes with your DNA or that a huge number of trial participants had experienced side-effects have no basis in reality.

QAnon sinks its teeth in

QAnon, the sprawling conspiracy theory touting claims that Mr Trump is poised to save the world from a “deep state” of child-abusing elites, well and truly arrived in Australia in 2020, helped along by the pandemic.

As Dr Kazz Ross, a lecturer and coordinator in Asian studies at the University of Tasmania told Fact Check, QAnon provided a ready-made, multifaceted conspiracy able to be adapted to changing circumstances.

She detailed how people searching for an explanation as to what might lie “behind” the pandemic would start interacting with anti-vaccination narratives, before delving deeper into claims about an international paedophile operation run by Jews.

But it wasn’t just extremists pulled into the QAnon vortex this year.

In recent months, social media posts featuring the tags #SaveTheChildren or #SaveOurChildren proliferated among QAnon followers and helped widen the conspiracy’s reach.

According to Dr Ross, who researches online extremism, a number of Australians had actively engaged with the Save Our Children campaign while having “no idea about the Q stuff”.

Alarmingly, much of the child trafficking rhetoric embraced by followers of QAnon has been based on a single false statistic — 800,000 children do not go missing in the US each year.

Despite the efforts of social media companies to crack down against QAnon — Facebook has now banned QAnon content from its platforms — it may have been too little too late, with at least two QAnon proponents winning congressional seats in the recent US elections.

The US vote

While November’s presidential election might not have been plagued by foreign disinformation campaigns, as was the case in 2016, it was far from free of false and misleading claims.

Arguably, the biggest spreader of this misinformation was Mr Trump himself, whose continuing assertions of fraudulent voting and a rigged election have repeatedly been found by US fact checkers to be baseless.

In fact, by September, Mr Trump had made more than 1,000 false or misleading claims about the election, according to the Washington Post Fact Checker.

There was no evidence, for example, that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had “switched” thousands of votes from Mr Trump to Democratic rival Joe Biden, nor were votes cast via Dominion systems counted outside the US.

Mr Trump may claim otherwise, but there were not “more votes than voters” in Detroit (a city in the key battleground state of Michigan, which was won by Mr Biden), nor have there been any credible accusations that election officials in the city counted the same votes multiple times.

In Georgia, another key state won by Mr Biden, the proportion of ballots rejected was not substantially lower than in 2016, as Mr Trump continues to claim.

And in Wisconsin, Mr Trump’s election night lead was not squashed by a “massive dump” of votes for Mr Biden in the middle of the night — mail-in ballots, which mostly favoured Mr Biden, had not yet been counted.

So, what’s next for misinformation and fact checking?

All of the experts contacted by Fact Check said they expected misinformation — whether related to COVID-19, bushfires or wild conspiracy theories — to gather momentum through 2021.

Particularly challenging, noted both QUT’s Dr Angus and First Draft’s Dr Kruger, would be the ongoing fight against vaccine misinformation.

“We expect to see vaccines remain a dominant narrative into 2021, and therefore be a target by agents of disinformation as well as those who, unfortunately, truly believe the misinformation they are spreading,” Dr Kruger said.

As for the lessons of 2020, Dr Angus suggested that certain media voices played a “disproportionate role in polluting the public sphere with misinformation”.

According to Dr Kruger, 2020 had made clear that “people often think they are consuming news but are actually watching and reading opinions from biased commentators ‘dressed up as news’”.

As to an appropriate antidote, she said it would be important for fact checkers and misinformation researchers to reach a mass audience — “the aunties, the uncles and grandmothers”, who were likely to pass on snippets of information they gleaned from various sources.

University of Tasmania researcher Dr Ross, meanwhile, said that a lot of the blame for misinformation lay at the feet of social media platforms.

Principal researcher: Ellen McCutchan

Got a fact that needs checking? Tweet us @ABCFactCheck or send us an email at factcheck@rmit.edu.au

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