New Research Review from Communication’s Jonathan Ong Examines Research on Racism and Disinformation During ‘Infodemic’

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The global reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed not simply a failure to communicate correct scientific facts, but “a fundamental moral failure to cultivate cosmopolitan solidarity and empathy” according to a new paper by Jonathan Corpus Ong, associate professor of communication.

In a research review published online by the Social Science Research Council’s MediaWell platform, Ong examines how the “infodemic” – the stream of information, misinformation and disinformation facing anyone absorbing traditional or social media – that has accompanied the pandemic has often reinforced racial prejudices and hierarchies, and has contributed to discrimination against marginalized communities.

“There is a critical gap in academic research on the intersection of health misinformation and the surge of hate speech in the pandemic moment,” Ong says of his report. “Studies focus on one or the other, but rarely consider how they interact, and how they affect diverse vulnerable communities within specific cultural contexts.”

Ong details the increases in physical and verbal racial bias incidents toward people of East Asian descent and a surge in anti-Chinese sentiment within different Asian countries, but also other targets of discrimination and profiling.

“Black and Latinx people in the United States were already disproportionately affected by the virus by virtue of professional and economic comorbidities,” he explains in the report. “They then became targets of media manipulators, such as when white supremacists circulated conspiracy theories that Black people could not contract the virus.”

The paper covers the intentional media manipulation by politicians and authoritarian governments who “opportunistically use fears of the virus and ‘fake news’ to seize political control and target dissenters,” and reflects upon how Ong’s fellow scholars can support each other and develop tools for community solidarity and allyship while engaging in risky research during the pandemic.

Drawing on interdisciplinary academic research, national surveys, opinion essays and investigative journalism around themes of disinformation and digital racism between February and November 2020, the review takes a holistic approach to understanding the dynamics of information warfare during crisis events.

“This review thus puts disinformation research in dialogue with sociological analysis of racism, crisis events, and the politics of platforms,” Ong writes.

“In these toxic times, disinformation researchers also need to find ways to support each other and manage the emotional and mental health traumas of conducting risky research. It is tricky to balance principles of care and patient attentiveness in the research process with the need to respond to fast-moving provocations in our current political moment,” he writes. “Hard decisions must be made between ‘pressing pause’ in order to contemplate and reflect, and actively organizing to build conceptual and methodological tools responsive to the specific moment.

“We need to find ways to listen and amplify the voices of those less heard while also holding allies accountable. We should be careful not to celebrate coordinated inauthentic behaviors simply because they are employed for causes we might be sympathetic to; these tactics might simply reproduce vicious cycles of hateful confrontation or provide a model for hatemongers to emulate in the future.”

The complete report, “The Contagion of Stigmatization: Racism and Discrimination in the ‘Infodemic’ Moment,” is available online now from MediaWell.