Mar 24, 2020
JOUR 2300 — Midterm Assignment (Coronavirus)
For this assignment I wanted to do a topic relevant to everyday life, and well, theres nothing else going on other than the coronavirus so my options were limited.
With that being said it’s been a very difficult week for the leaders and health experts around the globe and obviously a very difficult time for citizens all around the world.
Scattered amid a relentless barrage of news about COVID-19 case surges, quarantine orders, and medical supply shortages on Twitter this week, some happy stories softened the blows: Swans had returned to deserted Venetian canals. Dolphins too. And a group of elephants had sauntered through a village in Yunnan, China, gotten drunk off corn wine, and passed out in a tea garden.
These reports of wildlife triumphs in countries hard-hit by the novel coronavirus got hundreds of thousands of retweets. They went viral on Instagram and Tik Tok. They made news headlines. If there’s a silver lining of the pandemic, people said, this was it — animals were bouncing back, running free in a human-less world.
But it wasn’t real.
These photos were fake/altered in a variety of ways with the goal of misleading the public. The swans in the viral posts regularly appear in the canals of Burano, a small island in the greater Venice metropolitan area, where the photos were taken. The “Venetian” dolphins were filmed at a port in Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea, hundreds of miles away. No one has figured out where the drunken elephants photos came from, but a Chinese news report debunked the viral posts: While elephants did recently come through a village in Yunnan Province, China, their presence isn’t out of the norm, they aren’t the elephants in the viral photos, and they didn’t get drunk and pass out in a tea field.
These images show how fast rumors spread when it is eye catching and too good to be true. People are drawn towards emotional stories at this time of crisis. People are compelled to share posts that make them emotional because when we’re feeling stressed, joyous animal footage can be an irresistible story to share.
The problem with these images are that most people believe a photograph represents reality. “Photography furnishes evidence,” Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography. “Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re showing a photograph of it.” In a more modern term or way of putting it, you need a picture or it didn’t happen
These images are harmful and Unethical to and for our society.
From the Lester visual analysis reading it discusses the concept of Hedonism. From the Greek word for pleasure, Hedonism is closely related to the philosophies of Nihilism and narcissism. A student of socrates, Aristippus founded this ethical philosophy on the basis of pleasure. Aristippus believed that people should “act to maximize pleasure now and not worry about the future.”
Now there is definitely information that is far more harmful than fake animal stories related to the coronavirus, But it’s something we have to fight/remove when it comes to the fight against misinformation.
As the coronavirus has spread across the world, so too has misinformation about it, despite an aggressive effort by social media companies to prevent its dissemination. Facebook, Google and Twitter said they were removing misinformation about the coronavirus as fast as they could find it, and were working with the World Health Organization and other government organizations to ensure that people got accurate information.
But a search by The New York Times found dozens of videos, photographs and written posts on each of the social media platforms that appeared to have slipped through the cracks. The posts were not limited to English.
In fact, There is so much inaccurate information about the virus, the W.H.O. (World Health Organization) has said it was confronting a “infodemic”.
The battle against misinformation harms the citizens of our society. (Of particular concern in the short term are those spreading false or misleading health advice) This is often done with the best of intentions: it’s a natural response to a scary situation to pass on advice that you think might help protect your friends and family. But if that information turns out to be inaccurate, you risk doing more harm than good.
Citations-
