COVID-19 and the Role of Conspiracy Theories, Disinformation, and Fake News

All forms of misinformation are on the rise, and this especially applies to medical information. Although rampant after the first year of COVID-19, this phenomenon is not new. Perpetrators may be misinformed or outright grifters. Why this has happened is open to interpretation but may boil down to a heightened distrust and political discord. The mistrust is widespread and specifically directed at politicians, religious leaders, public health officials, and scientists who are felt to be arrogant and untrustworthy. Social media has been a large force as algorithms in Facebook and other social media, have driven users to the extremes of political thinking, and this is carried over to medical misinformation. The bottom line of artificial intelligence (AI) is very rapidly evolving as it very quickly evolves into becoming more malignant with more rampant deep fakes, for example. Countermeasures have been slow in coming. Truth peddlers are often less interesting. Fact-checking is open to criticism and is often too slow in coming. Computer amalgamations and AI may be able to stop something malicious from quickly becoming viral and can quickly get truthful information out.