It’s time for social-media distancing  06.04.2020

In just over three months, the number of Covid-19 patients has swelled past a million, but dubious information about the disease spreads much faster. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described it as an ‘infodemic’. Sylvie Briand, the WHO officer leading the fight against fake coronavirus-related news, blamed social media for amplifying it.

What can we — ordinary citizens — do to tame the infodemic? The usual prescription is to get your facts from trusted sources and do some fact-checking yourself before you share. But that’s easier said than done. Apps like Facebook and Twitter are designed for ease of sharing, and when you like something on them — true or false — you reflexively share.

Quartz journalist Ephrat Livni makes a timely suggestion that can help us tackle not only fake news but also the other noise on social media. In her article (The Best Way To Use Social Media Is To Act Like A 19th-Century Parisian), she says we should behave online the way we do in the physical world. We aren’t always “itching for a fight, exchanging barbs and insults...making much ado about topics we often know very little about,” the way we do on our apps.

What we need to do, she says, is slow down our response time. If you don’t like something, delay reacting to it. If you like something, delay liking and sharing it. Maybe, when you come back to it an hour or a day later, the urge to react would have passed. You might realise that you had nothing valuable to add to the conversation anyway.

Most of our social media activity is influenced by what others think and expect: “the expectations for empty affirmations”. Maintaining social media silence lets you think for yourself, and that would be good because “a moral society depends on thinking individuals.”

For more: Quartz & The Lancet

SEE, DON’T SAY: Just as lockdowns stop pandemics, your social-media silence can stop an infodemic