A Racist aspect of COVID-19 disinformation in Greek social media
The spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in early 2020 has triggered, an “infodemic” according to the WHO on social media worldwide. An epidemic of news related to the virus, with some of news sources being accurate and some not make it hard for people to find trustworthy sources. Since the pandemic’s outbreak many falsehoods about coronavirus have circulated in nearly every country. Narratives about the virus being a biological weapon, 5G causing the pandemic, Bill Gates’ alleged involvement, malign vaccinations, for instance have troubled fact-checkers across the world. Even so, what is really interesting to study is how COVID-19 disinformation adjusts to each country’s reality, mirroring each country’s preexisting problems and beliefs.
In this report we will analyse how disinformation about the virus during the Greek lockdown was often related to the refugee and immigrant crisis with expressions of prejudice towards them and their religion, Islam. Also, to better understand the spread of this kind of disinformation we will attempt a superficial analysis of the profiles of those who spread misleading content.
Most of the data comes from the first phase of The Fake News Hunters research, conducted by DCN SEE HUB and Forum Apulum, reporting how disinformation spreads in Greece and Romania from 1st April to 7th May. The research’s first report was published on the DCN SEE HUB site.
Before moving forward, we must make clear why tackling disinformation in social media is crucially important in Greece. The 10-year economic crisis that the country had faced, led to a massive disbelief in mainstream media. According to the Reuters Institute, many Greeks do not trust traditional media (which they accuse of being corrupt), and prefer to seek information online, mainly on social media. The most dominant social media platform in Greece is Facebook, used by 58% of social media users for sharing news. This is the reason why we decided to pay attention to tackling disinformation on Facebook, rather than on any other social network.
COVID-19 Disinformation against refugees, immigrants and Islam
Using the data collected by the Fake News Hunters Research, we categorized the disinformation narratives in Greece into nine categories. Considering that some of these narratives fell under more than one category we focused on the main claims of each one.
1) GOV (Narratives against the government and the authorities)
2) 5G (Narratives relating COVID-19 to 5G)
3) AVX (COVID-19 antivaccination movement)
4) OVER (Claims for overreporting coronavirus cases and deaths)
5) NOR (“The pandemic is not real, it has been planned or is a hoax”)
6) IM/RF (COVID-19 disinformation related to refugees, immigrants and Islam)
7) GATES (Narratives about Bill Gates causing the pandemic, or wanting to inject people with microchips)
8) LAB (Claims that the virus is a bioweapon accidentally or purposefully leaked from a laboratory)
9) OTH (Other)
Based on this categorization, the narratives about COVID-19 related to immigrants, refugees and Islam gained a percentage of 12.8%, coming in third place, following narratives blaming the government (17.9%) and narratives claiming an overreporting of incidents and deaths caused by the virus (17.9%). As we can see the percentage of the IM/RF category is not very high, but it is not negligible, especially compared with other categories such as 5G (7.7%) and LAB (5.1%), which include narratives that have gained global attention.
The content of these discriminative narratives varies from one to the other. Some of these narratives claim that the lockdown was just an excuse to shut down Orthodox Churches during Easter and that the lockdown would be over just in time for Ramadan. So, according to these stories, Greeks could not celebrate Orthodox Easter while refugees and immigrants could have Ramadan. Other narratives blame refugees and immigrants for not keeping to social distancing guidelines, thus contributing to the spread of the virus. Some of these comments argued that immigrants take advantage of the lockdown to assault Greek women. Finally, some narratives tried to politicise the situation claiming that the government uses the lockdown to bring more refugees and immigrants to the country or that immigrants are spies, sent by the Turkish president to Greece.
As we can see Islamophobia and the refugee crisis were an important disinformation topic, even in terms of COVID-19 disinformation. Of course, Islamophobia is not a new concept in Greek society, which still remains very conservative and religious. The fear of Islam goes back to the time when the country was under Ottoman rule. However, the recent refugee crisis has renewed feelings against Islam and its followers[1]. For some people, Greek culture and history and the principles of orthodox Christianity are interrelated. This message is condensed in the radical right slogan “Homeland, Religion, Family”, illustrating how these should exist together according to nationalists, and form the nation’s mentality. This idea has contributed to significant discrimination against refugees and immigrants coming from Islamic countries, who are considered to be a threat to the country.
But still, why is there so much disinformation against refugees and immigrants?
To answer this question, we should look on who is spreading disinformation in Greek social media. To do so we used the data collected for the Fake News Hunters research again. We analyse those profiles that regularly spread misleading content, based on what they generally post.
It came out that there are three main profile categories; 1) The nationalists, 2) The “conspiracy theorists”, and 3) Profiles that could not fit in either category, or any other category.
[1] Chatzipanagiotou, Matthildi & Zarikos, Iason. (2019). Countering Islamophobia in Greece. 10.1007/978–3–030–16260–3_4. Pages: 79–85
From this analysis it is clear that most of those who spread disinformation in Greece are people who belong to right-wing political groups, which probably explains why too many fake narratives are related to refugees and immigrants. Specifically, more than 57% (!) of those who spread disinformation in Greece could be considered to be nationalists. All these profiles share common characteristics. For example, most of them are fanatically religious and believe that Greece and the Orthodox Church are under attack. They are mostly middle-aged people of both genders, although there are also younger people in these groups. They post about Greece’s supremacy, religion, messages against minorities, and call for Greeks to “wake up” and save their nation. Although the present Greek government comes from the conservative center-right, most of these profiles are against the government, considering it corrupted. Also, many of these profiles are connected to and support each other (they are friends, follow the same pages, or are members of the same nationalistic Facebook groups), thus creating a disinformation network. What must be highlighted is that many of these profiles attack Greece’s biggest fact-checking organization, downplaying its credibility and journalistic value. This probably happens because this organization, in partnership with Facebook, blocks many of their misleading posts.
Apart from nationalists, disinformation is also spread by “conspiracy theorists”. This group contains profiles that mostly post conspiracy theories, unrelated to national issues. The main difference with the previous ones is that these people do not only post nationalistic and patriotic content. They mostly post mainstream conspiracy theories, that usually originate from other countries and have been circulating on the net for years. During the pandemic, they posted conspiracy theories about 5G, Bill Gates’ potential involvement, anti-vaccination, for example.
Profiles that do not fit into the previous categories or could not be categorised at all according to their content, fall under the third and last category. These are usually profiles that do not post often or post under various topics or we could not have access to all their posts.
Something important that must be mentioned is that most (or even all) of the accounts analysed seem to belong to real people. Not one of the accounts we analysed could be considered as fake account.
In terms of why these people spread misinformation, we have reached the following conclusions. It seems that most of those who share this disinformation do believe in what they share, but those who generate this content seem to have some motivations to do so.
It came out that 25% of the profiles we analysed, seem to spread disinformation on purpose. On the one hand, some of them try to politicise the situation, blaming the government for the way it has handled the pandemic crisis and other national issues, such as the immigration crisis and relations with Turkey. They usually call on their followers to ignore government’s guidelines and protest against the government. On the other hand, some of these people aim to gain some kind of publicity through these posts. For example, they try to promote their blogs, websites and groups or even gain more followers. Α striking example of this is a self-declared medical researcher who was underestimating the effects of the virus and he gained thousands of followers during the pandemic. What is interesting is that even after it was revealed (by the aforementioned fact-checking organization) that he was not a doctor, people not only continued to strongly support him, but argued that he was attacked for telling the truth. Until today this man continues to gain followers, who rely on him for “trustworthy” information.
So, is there any way for the situation to change?
Unfortunately, the data collected for the second phase of The Fake News Hunters research shows us the exact opposite. After the end of the lockdown fake narratives related to refugees and immigrants have dramatically increased.
Probably the only way for the situation to change is by changing the way people think, but considering that this is a hard task, there are some other more achievable things that can be done. For example, Greek traditional media should try to gain their trustworthiness back, maybe by reporting the pandemic in a decent way. Moreover, fact checkers should try to expand their job, not only trying to tackle disinformation narratives, but figure out why these narratives have such great appeal. But at the end of the day it is on us, the people, who should think twice before sharing anything on social media, considering who is saying what and why, being aware that some people express their racist beliefs against minorities, even through irrelevant to immigration topics, such as the medical topic. Teaching media literacy could play an important role in this task, to achieve a more effective long-term elimination of disinformation.
*Written by Yannis Delimaris
Members of the Fake News Hunters team: Dr. Nikos Panagiotou (GR). Erasmia Tsipou (GR), Ioanna Georgia Eskiadi (GR), Yannis Delimaris (GR), Diana Filimon (RO), Ciprian Cucu (RO), Ana Diavid (RO), Vlad Birău (RO), Alexandru Corpade (RO), Adrian Man (RO).
Digital Communication Network begins the series of publications on Digital Challenges in the Time of COVID-19 Crisis.
