Viral Media: The COVID-19 Infodemic, Black Lives Matter, and the Future of the Digital Public Sphere
By Lee A. Flamand, PhD
As the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc and altered patterns of daily life for people across the globe, muddled political responsiveness in the USA has taken a particularly heinous toll aggravated by pre-existing social, economic, and racial tensions. While the most recent explosion of BLM protests was no doubt sparked by the murder of George Floyd, it is hard to deny that its flames were stoked in the kindling of an unfolding economic and national health crisis which has fallen disproportionally upon already vulnerable communities of color. Under the surface of this conflagration, a potentially game-changing culture war over the future of the digital public sphere is quietly playing out behind our screens, as it seems that digital platforms are beginning to show an increased willingness to wade into public debates, change their policies, and more actively curate content in order to help achieve goals they see as crucial to both the common good and their own public image.
In the wake of what the WHO has described as an “infodemic” – a deluge of pandemic-related mis- and disinformation flooding the online channels through which an increasing number of people consume news, crowding out accurate information and threatening to further erode trust in public institutions – major social media and search companies have taken subtle yet consequential action. Many of the biggest names in IT– most notably Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter – have taken steps to suppress potentially dangerous mis- and disinformation about COVID-19 while actively promoting accurate information by legitimate health organizations such as the WHO and the CDC. This has resulted in a game of viral media whack-a-mole, as evinced by attempts to contain the infamous Plandemic video, a hodgepodge of discredited conspiracy theories decked out in the generic trappings of conventional documentary film-making which, in spite of aggressive efforts, has still garnered