The article below is an extract of a much larger paper published by the National Centre for Biotechnology and the National Library of Medicine in the USA. Its research focuses on how one life-changing global event got connected to a technology conspiracy theory – propagated by social media and became what is now known as a digital wildfire, which then spread all over the internet. Read in connection with our piece on – “The Meta Algorithmic Dilemma: Balancing Truth and Profit During Elections‘ – it is evident that there are two forces at work at the same time. One of them is highlighted below; the other of those forces is just plain greed.

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 content 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.

On January 21, 2020, the first message which linked the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, to 5G wireless technology appeared on Twitter, stating: “China is 5G now & working toward 6G. Wireless radiation is an immunosuppressor. Coincidence?”. The tweet got little reaction, but in the following days, a series of similar tweets appeared. Their number grew steadily, and about ten weeks later, in early April, a series of arson attacks hit wireless network equipment, mostly cell towers, in the UK as well as in Ireland, the Netherlands, Cyprus, and New Zealand. With these attacks, the misinformation became a digital wildfire.

Digital wildfires, which are defined as fast-spreading and inaccurate, counterfactual, or intentionally misleading pieces of information that quickly permeate public consciousness and have serious real-world implications, have been placed among the top global risks in the twenty-first century by the World Economic Forum [27]. While a sheer endless amount of misinformation exists on the Internet, only a small fraction of it spreads far and affects people to such a degree that they commit harmful acts in the real world. The alleged connection between 5G and COVID-19 differed little from other counterfactual statements which are common on the internet. However, it had a far greater effect. Similar events have been observed before, e.g., misinformation linked to mob violence in India [11], where several random people were killed after rumours about child abduction appeared on WhatsApp and were shared widely. Here, a single message in a social network was spread among a massive number of users, which was relatively easy to track afterwards. On the other hand, the perceived link between 5G and COVID-19 was not caused by a single message in a social network. Instead, the digital wildfire consisted of many messages on Twitter and other social networks, which combined into a single misinformation event. We call such events complex digital wildfires.

Clearly, investigating complex digital wildfires is far more challenging than investigating ordinary (i.e., simple) digital wildfires. In this paper, we perform such an analysis for misinformation that links 5G and COVID-19 in order to understand its origins and the factors that contributed to its spread. We searched through a massive set of COVID-19-related messages from Twitter that were archived as early as January 2020, thereby finding the first tweets that mention a connection between 5G and COVID-19. Based on a manually labelled dataset, we train a machine learning classifier to distinguish between tweets that insinuate a connection between unrelated terms and those that only mention both without claiming a connection. We chart the number of such tweets over time and analyze the geographical distribution. Our goal is to investigate six fundamental questions:

1. How did the 5G-COVID misinformation event start, and where did it come from in January 2020?
2. How did it grow from relative obscurity to a widely discussed topic in late March 2020?
3. What is the connection to the serious real-world consequences observed in April 2020?
4. How did the wildfire develop around the globe between April 2020 and November 2021?
5. Which general observations can we make from the structure of the specific event?
6. What lessons and policy recommendations can we draw from these observations?

In the remainder of the paper, we first discuss the real-world events associated with the wildfire and investigate its origins using qualitative methods in Sect. 2. We then extend the analysis to the main body of misinformation in Sect. 3. By investigating a large number of Twitter messages, we lay the groundwork for quantitative analysis via machine learning methods, the results of which are presented in Sect. 4. In Sect. 5, we discuss the interplay between the spread of this misinformation on Twitter and on video platforms such as YouTube, and we investigate the motivations for spreading such misinformation in Sect. 6. We finish the paper by discussing related work in Sect. 7 and present our conclusions in Sect. 8.

Read the whole paper HERE