Commentary: Global pandemics, conflict and networks - the dynamics of international instability, infodemics and health care in the 21st century.

Back in early 2020, none of us knew what we were going into. The lockdown imposed in Wuhan seemed strange and alien; we took comfort from the neighbourhood singing in lockdown Italy but could not quite imagine that happening here, and when it did finally happen here, few of us had any notion that restrictions would continue for two years. Even less did we conceive that a major battle site in the war against the virus would be digital platforms from which the weaponry of online postings would be launched.

And yet, social media have played a central role in the campaign to overcome the lethal effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its ability to bring about a second major crisis to capitalism in just over a decade, occasioning an even greater disruption to the global economy than that produced by the financial crash of 2008 (Cankett and Andrade, 2020). This has not been confined to the messaging of health authorities and governments disseminating information about public health advice but has entailed extensive sharing and exchange of factual and non-factual information. This has resulted in the opening up of a significant gulf between contrasting beliefs about the nature of the virus and the nature of the main public health measures being deployed against it, notably vaccines and a variety of non-pharmacological interventions which incur restrictions on individual freedom.

It is into this territory that the authors have chosen to enter. Rather than collecting empirical data relating to the beliefs and knowledge of individuals (e.g. Benoit and Mauldin, 2021) or the factors associated with vaccine hesitancy (e.g. Soares et al., 2021) as others have done, the authors adopt a much bigger canvas and make selected developments over the past two years their data.

Their starting point is a subscription to Ian Morris’s theory that transformative change occurs every 500–1000 years resulting in epochal shifts in human civilisation and that these changes come about through what Morris terms the ‘Five Horsemen’: climate change, food scarcity/famine, rapid and large-scale population movements between regions, governance/state failure and epidemics which interact to bring about disruptive crises. To these Five Horsemen, the authors wish to add a sixth harbinger of a future destabilised world: the ‘networked infodemic’. This borrows and extends Bin Naeem et al.’s concept of the infodemic, considered a growth in the volume of, sharing of and access to information via the internet. The newly coined ‘networked infodemic’ consists of online misinformation and disinformation distributed and amplified through networks of likeminded individuals which becomes itself a significant driver of change. Since the networked infodemic has driven widespread conflict and mistrust of expert healthcare advice and knowledge, undermining the ability of many to distinguish accurate from false information, it should be regarded, the authors argue, as ‘similar’ to or ‘much the same as’ the spread of population-based viral disease.

The authors use Morris’s theory as a framework for developing their own argument, integrating it with network theory to create an analysis which addresses what they see as the comparative neglect in Morris’s theory of the major role of the digital in the dynamics of human society and the absence in Bin Naeem et al.’s ‘infodemic’ of an adequate consideration of the distorting effects of digital information sharing. They apply this to selected global developments in the past two years to construct a narrative account which enables us to think about the widespread misinformation, which has emerged as one of the defining characteristics of the pandemic, as first, infecting and corrupting the body of human society and second, as a force which, in combination with other developments, contributes to the destabilisation of that society. The authors propose that it is the centrality of online dissemination and exchange of information both to shaping views of reality and to mounting adequate collective responses to major global health threats which elevates the influence of digital networks as a principal driver of change.

Misinformation spreads through digital platforms, exchanged among digital communities where it is fashioned by key actors – ‘nodes’ with super-spreading capability – into conspiracy theories, generating widespread distrust of official health-related information and advice. Startlingly, the authors report the finding of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate that 65% of COVID-19 misinformation could be traced to just 12 individuals. To demonstrate the resilience of the simile, the authors demonstrate how dealing with a network infodemic can be compared to ways of addressing a viral epidemic: for example, through monitoring the R rate of disinformation spread and training health professionals in digital skills.

The strength of the account is the authors’ ability to integrate concepts and theories from diverse bodies of work to develop a novel thesis which allows us to see current developments in new ways. It is not the influence of social media on public perceptions which is new in this paper but the construction of the dynamics of that social media activity as a portent of future epochal destabilisation. It may well be, given the status of research on digital communication as relatively undeveloped, that further research on the big data generated via digital platforms leads over time to a refinement of the authors’ thesis.