Mitigating Medical Misinformation During an Infodemic

Key Concepts

Terminology and Definitions

Donovan emphasizes precision in vocabulary:

• Media manipulation: Changing by artful or unfair means to serve one's purpose. Includes both malicious campaigns and activism (e.g., culture jamming). The key is that media's importance is artificially elevated through strategic means.
• Disinformation: Intentionally false information created and distributed for political ends. Sets a high bar: evidence of origin, intent, and stated goals needed before labeling something disinformation.
• Misinformation: False information spread without necessarily knowing its origin or intent. Occurs in all communication; what the field studies is misinformation at scale.

The Infodemic Problem

During health crises (specifically COVID-19), accurate public health information circulates alongside false claims simultaneously. This creates an infodemic — confusion from the parallel spread of accurate and inaccurate information — which exploits and amplifies uncertainty.

Five-Stage Campaign Lifecycle Framework

Donovan's team at the Shorenstein Center analyzes disinformation campaigns across five observable stages. Understanding which stage a campaign occupies helps responders deploy appropriate countermeasures:

Stage 1: Planning & Ideation

• Where and when is the campaign designed?
• Often takes place in fringe communities (4chan, Discord, specialized forums) or among organized bad actors.
• Example: the term "Plandemic" circulated among conspiracy theorists for months before a documentary used it.
• Rarely caught in this stage; may not be obvious which speculation will become a coordinated campaign.

Stage 2: Seeding

• Does the campaign begin spreading across social platforms and the web?
• Moves beyond initial community into YouTube videos, blogs, social media posts, replies.
• Monitoring for cross-platform migration helps signal escalation.

Stage 3: Amplification (Critical Stage)

• When do newsworthy figures — journalists, celebrities, politicians — take it up?
• Scale explodes once credible-looking sources amplify the claim.
• Journalists amplifying without debunking strategies accelerate spread; celebrities or influencers within target communities multiply reach.
• Example: Donovan cites "Canaries in the Coal Mine" research showing COVID-19 misinformation was targeted at Black communities via Instagram influencers, with strategic focus on high-reach accounts.

Stage 4: Mitigation

• How do actors respond? Journalists write debunks; platforms remove content or apply fact-check labels; law enforcement investigates; public health agencies issue guidance.
• Common platform responses: user bans, content removal, labels, fact-check attachments.
• Manipulators sometimes adapt by re-sharing content through other vectors (e.g., Internet Archive links to bypass removed content).

Stage 5: Adaptation

• How do manipulators adjust when mitigation strategies succeed?
• Example: When Medium removed medical misinformation posts, manipulators pivoted to sharing Internet Archive snapshots to circumvent fact-checks.
• Multi-lingual translation of false content represents another adaptation.

Manipulation Tactics

The video catalogs specific tactics observed in medical misinformation campaigns:

Keyword squatting:

• Bad actors exploit search terms people use when seeking information during crises (e.g., "N95 masks," "where to get COVID test").
• Users encounter scams, fake products, identity theft forms, or credential harvesting rather than legitimate medical information.
• Mitigating requires monitoring the keyword landscape around health crises and ensuring authoritative sources occupy top search positions.

Media recontextualization:

• Banal or ordinary video (person outside a hospital on a normal day) is reframed as evidence of a false narrative ("hospitals aren't actually overrun").
• People taking videos during vaccine clinics or testing sites — innocuous content — becomes "evidence" for conspiracy theories.
• As video becomes ubiquitous, manipulators will exploit any existing footage to support false claims.

Fake graphics / infographics ("misinfo-graphics"):

• False data visualizations claiming to show COVID-19 severity is lower than reported, or testing increases explain case increases (not actual spread).
• Misappropriation of logos (WHO, CDC, university affiliations) to lend false authority.
• Even when taken down from one platform, content circulates via screenshots and archive links.

Distributed amplification:

• A strategic actor explicitly tells followers to download and re-upload content to multiple platforms, knowing platforms will remove it but betting on volume.
• Example: Plandemic's creators told supporters to "bypass the gatekeepers" by downloading and uploading the film everywhere — creating thousands of instances for platforms to chase.
• When one instance is removed, dozens others remain.

Case Study: Plandemic Documentary

Donovan details the lifecycle of the Plandemic film as a textbook disinformation campaign:

• Pre-production: "Plandemic" was an established keyword among conspiracy theorists for months, primed to suggest a planned pandemic.
• Content: A documentary featuring anti-vaccination activist making false claims (e.g., masks don't work).
• Seeding: Creators knew platforms would aggressively remove it; they prepared distributed amplification strategy in advance.
• Amplification: The film was uploaded thousands of times across platforms via the coordinated "download and re-upload" campaign.
• Mitigation: Platforms removed it; journalists and researchers (including Donovan) documented and debunked it.
• Adaptation: Creators translated the film into multiple languages, extending reach beyond English-speaking audiences and complicating platform moderation.
• Outcome: First film reached massive scale; second, longer version fell flat because platforms and researchers were prepared. However, the content persists globally in multiple languages.

Stakeholder Strategies

Donovan identifies allies in each campaign stage and proposes specific coordination strategies:

Stage 1–2: Monitoring and Civil Society Coordination

• Identify habitual manipulators and flag their early signals.
• Coordinate across civil society organizations to monitor emerging themes (e.g., known that vaccine hesitancy and 5G conspiracy theories would precede any roll-out).
• Pre-position trusted messengers in communities before campaigns gain traction.

Stage 3: Media and Messaging

• Train local officials that responding to rumors can amplify them ("calling it a story when it's not").
• Ensure messaging is comprehensive, clear, and multi-channel — not just reactive debunks.
• Repeat reliable information across multiple channels (TV, radio, social media) using sticky, memorable slogans (e.g., "flatten the curve" — three words, psychologically optimal).
• Build relationships with local journalists and reporters who can distribute authoritative information at scale.

Stage 4: Platform and Institutional Response

• Contact platforms to flag problematic content.
• Flag misappropriated logos and branding to the organizations they belong to.
• Deploy fact-check labels, content warnings, or removal.
• Public health agencies should be the primary spokespeople, not politicians (if political actors have conflicting incentives).

Stage 5: Preparedness for Adaptation

• Anticipate that successful mitigation will trigger adaptation.
• Maintain relationships with allies who can respond at each stage.
• Use multi-platform, coordinated messaging campaigns with targeted advertising to reach vulnerable demographics.
• Support civil society organizations that have existing trust relationships with communities.

Effective Mitigation Approaches

Drawing on communication science research, Donovan highlights three key strategies:

1. Fact-Fallacy (or "Refutation") Communication:

• State facts first (not the false claim).
• Identify the false claim being debunked.
• Reiterate the facts again.
• Pair with inoculation: explain the logical fallacy supporting the misinformation to build resistance to similar future claims.

2. Redundant, Multi-Channel Messaging:

• Misinformation spreads fast because false claims are outrageous; truth is boring.
• Truth must be amplified systematically across channels, not left to go viral.
• Local trust matters: people trust local radio, TV, and journalism even while consuming news online.
• Use consistent, memorable messaging across all channels.

3. Strategic Allies and Platforms:

• Manipulation campaigns thrive in information vacuums — when timely, local, relevant, authoritative information is absent.
• Platforms can elevate trusted sources if relationships exist.
• Civil society organizations with existing community trust are powerful allies in reaching vulnerable populations.

MediaManipulation.org and the Casebook

Donovan references her team's open-access resource, mediamanipulation.org, which provides:

• A digital casebook linking theory, methods, and practice for mapping media manipulation campaigns.
• Featured definitions of manipulation tactics.
• Case studies like Plandemic analyzed across all five lifecycle stages.
• Resources for researchers, journalists, technologists, policymakers, educators, and civil society organizers.

Notes

This webinar was designed for public health professionals, but the framework applies across domains. The five-stage lifecycle and tactic catalog are widely adopted in both academic research and policy circles. Donovan's emphasis on the distribution of costs (to journalists, public health officials, civil society, election infrastructure) rather than framing misinformation as an individual "belief problem" is sociologically sophisticated and has influenced how institutions understand their role in information defense.

The timing (references to pandemic, vaccine roll-out, but no explicit date) suggests 2020–2021. The talk represents a practical distillation of the Shorenstein Center's media manipulation research, bridging academic rigor with actionable guidance for practitioners.