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Misinformation floods social media after disasters

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Viral posts reap ad money for creators and platforms alike

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'Wild West' has few guardrails preventing fake news

By Lin Taylor

LONDON, April 10 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) -

P rofiteers have flooded social media with fake news and bogus

videos since a powerful earthquake devastated Myanmar last

month, exploiting the chaos with clickbait that can reap tens of

thousands in ad revenues, digital activists say.

Be it sensational images that go viral or fake rescue tales,

the schemes prey on the heightened fears and appetite for news

that follow any disaster or outbreak of war.

"People just have to assume there's a lot of false

information that circulates. They should be aware there are

people making money off of false information," said Darrell

West, a senior technology researcher at the Brookings

Institution think-tank.

The death toll from Myanmar's March 28 quake has risen to

more than 3,600, according to state media, with a further 5,000

injured and hundreds of people still missing.

The quake was the latest blow for the impoverished Southeast

Asian country of 53 million, following a 2021 coup that returned

the military to power and devastated its economy after a decade

of development and tentative democracy.

Grassroots group Digital Insight Lab, which runs Facebook

pages countering misinformation and hate speech in Myanmar, said

it had seen viral posts claiming to show the devastation of the

disaster even though the videos were shot in Syria and Malaysia,

or created from scratch by artificial intelligence (AI).

"Many of these reports repurpose photos and videos from

unrelated past incidents, while others leverage AI-generated

content to fabricate false narratives," said research officer

Windy, who used a pseudonym for safety.

Misinformation and disinformation are common on social media

following catastrophes, digital experts say, be it miscaptioned

images, fake videos or false narratives about rescue efforts.

"When you have mis- and disinformation, it can escalate

panic, you can delay your evacuation. It can undermine the trust

that you have in emergency services. It can also be really

distracting," said Jeanette Elsworth, head of communications at

the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR).

After Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the United States

last year, false rumours spread accusing the government of

channelling federal disaster funds to illegal migrants.

When a massive quake hit Turkey and Syria in 2023, killing

more than 51,000 people, fraudsters uploaded old videos of

tsunamis in Japan and Greenland, claiming it was real-time

footage from the new disaster zone.

"We have a Wild West now where virtually anything goes.

There are very few laws regulating content online, and the tech

companies aren't doing very much to protect people," West, of

the Brookings Institution, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

MISINFORMATION PAYS

More than $20 billion was made in 2024 through advertising

revenues shared between social platforms and content creators,

according to tech policy group What To Fix.

Content creators use platforms such as Facebook, Instagram

and Tik Tok to get a share of revenue from the ads displayed

with their posts, said founder Victoire Rio, who has also worked

in Myanmar researching misinformation.

She said the model incentivises creators to produce viral

posts, even if they are false or AI-generated, because the more

views and shares they attract, the more money they make.

Though it is difficult to calculate an exact figure,

fraudsters have been able to earn tens of thousands of dollars

during previous crises such as the 2021 Myanmar coup, Rio said.

A 2021 study by fact-checking firm NewsGuard and analytics

company Comscore ( SCOR ) said misinformation websites reap $2.6 billion

from digital advertising each year.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, accounts for more

than 60% of the social advertising market and had over 3.1

million creator accounts in 2024, a 55% increase on the previous

year, according to What To Fix.

"In the current context in Myanmar, a vast volume of the

disinformation you're seeing circulate is financially

motivated," Rio said.

Meta said they remove posts that violate their policies,

working with partners to debunk false claims and move such

content down the feed "so fewer people see it."

In January, Meta scrapped its U.S. fact-checking programmes

and shifted its approach to managing political content.

TikTok said it bans misleading and false content on its

platform and proactively removed inaccurate posts after the

Myanmar quake, directing users to credible sources.

It said it has trained moderators and fact-checking partners

working in 50+ languages.

Rio said the lack of information coming out of Myanmar due

to internet shutdowns was also fuelling misinformation.

"You have a huge community of people that are turning to

Facebook from outside of Myanmar trying to find information. And

those people are particularly vulnerable to misinformation

because they are desperately looking for information," Rio said.

Htaike Htaike Aung, director of the Myanmar Internet

Project, which tracks the country's internet blackouts, said the

situation was putting lives at risk.

"Due to it's clickbaity nature and how social media

algorithms function, (fake posts) are often at the top of the

newsfeed, which makes people having access to quality

information more challenging," said Aung.

"It's hindering a lot of aid efforts. Access to information

at this time is a life and death situation."

REDUCING RISKS

Eliska Pirkova, senior policy analyst at digital rights

group Access Now, said platforms should do more to head off

misinformation instead of relying on community groups to report

false content after it runs.

"Access to information is always a lifeline, and especially

during times of crisis. So (platforms) have very heightened due

diligence obligations," she said.

"Local civil society organisations often have to step in and

take the burden of flagging and escalating cases. These

resources are already extremely scarce because they are dealing

with the crisis on the ground."

Governments have also been urged to step up.

While the European Union aims to rein in tech companies, the

United States has ditched some protective guardrails to

accelerate its dominance of the global market.

Either way, it will take more than Big Tech and

government to tackle fake news, said UNDRR's Elsworth, who urged

religious leaders, civil society and local media to play their

part, too.

"Everybody needs to get involved," she said. "It's ... about

empowering people at every level to do what they need to do."

(Reporting by Lin Taylor, Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths. Please

credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of

Thomson Reuters. Visit https://www.context.news/)