Discussion Draft Posted: "Social Listening and Infodemic—An Epidemiology for the Body Politic"

Pix ©Larry Catá Backer 2024

I am delighted to share a discussion draft of the essay--Social Listening and Infodemic—An Epidemiology for the Body Politic.

ABSTRACT: The COVID pandemic occurred alongside an infodemic that substantially inhibited the ability of public health authorities to manage COVID responses, especially as they touched on vaccination and containment. This essay considers the World Health Organization (WHO) response to infodemic. That response focus on the identification of the symptoms of, and the development of a treatment for, the disease of mis-, mal- and dis-information on the body politic. Where pandemic focuses on the treatment of the body against foreign organisms, infodemic focuses on the treatment of the body politic against debilitation of its narrative constitution. While vaccine served as the core treatment for COVID, 'social listening´ served as the foundation of the COVID infodemic vaccine. The interfaces between the conceptual organization of responses to pandemic and infodemic, then, were embedded in WHO’s new approaches to information surveillance and management, and serve as the basis for analysis. . The first is between an epidemiology of pandemic (physical health) and infodemic (societal health). The second is between epistemological and normative human (social-political-health systems) and virtual (digital, predictive, and generative AI based systems). The third is between epidemiological and normative systems as they interconnect n pandemic. The model and the warning emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The start of a resolution appears to blend human and virtual, physical and social threats grounded in an objective of efficient management through the management of the body (medicine) and the social spirit (narrative). Social listening, especially as a tool of social epidemiology, begins to reveal its promise and its challenges, eight of which will be sketched out.

 

Pix Shanghai Museum of Art 

The analysis is built around WHO/UNICEF's “How to Build an Infodemic Insights Report in Six Steps.” That, in turn, was grounded in the therapies and conceptual premises of 'social listening' an increasingly powerful tool for the management of the health of the collective body (social and politic) (eg here). Yet social listening is passive int he sense that it acquires information about the chatter that constitutes narrative (and to some extent also helps shape the way in which the identification and analysis of that chatter itself shapes the narrative). It is, in a sense descriptive analytics that can be dynamic or focus on a moment in time. But for infodemic, social listening also needs two additional elements. The first is an intervention element--that is how does knowledge of the patterns and content of chatter provide vectors for intervening and nudging that chatter going forward. The second are the tools and analytics through which one can seek not just to predict the trajectories of chatter on narrative (understood as the evidence of collective imaginaries and their consequences for responses to social stimuli) but to shape it by modeling potential effects to possible interventions. All of this requires a technology, which like that of responses to threats to the physical body, produce consequences of their own. In the case of active social listening and intervention strategies, those touch on the technologies of big data analytics and automated decision-making by non-human generative intelligence (considered here).

Bound up in that analysis of WHO's social listening based responses is the consideration of the conceptual inter-connection between pandemic and infodemic. That interconnection seeps into the way in which one approaches the conception of infodemic in epistemological terms. It also manifests in the response--the construction of modalities for observing symptoms and administering medicine, vaccines against mis-, dis-, and mal-information intimately connected with the challenges of overcoming pandemics. It is in that conceptual universe that the application of "social listening" becomes more useful and relevant. But relevant as well are the big data implications of regimes of informational surveillance and narrative interventions designed to align the course of treatment of physical disease with that of the disease produced in the body politic by the corruption of information. The analysis, of course, exists within a broader conversation about the technologies of comprehensive control through the alignment of mass organizations in all fields (eg here).

The text of the draft may be accessed in SSRN here; the introduction first part follows below.  Comments and reactions always welcome.

 

Social Listening and Infodemic—AnEpidemiology for the Body Politic

 

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law and International Affairs

Pennsylvania State University

239 Lewis Katz Building

University Park, PA 16802   

 

Email:  lcb11@psu.edu

 

 

 

ABSTRACT: The COVID pandemic occurred alongside an infodemic that substantially inhibited the ability of public health authorities to manage COVID responses, especially as they touched on vaccination and containment. This essay considers the World Health Organization (WHO) response to infodemic. That response focus on the identification of the symptoms of, and the development of a treatment for, the disease of mis-, mal- and dis-information  on the body politic. Where pandemic focuses on the treatment of the body against foreign organisms, infodemic focuses on the treatment of the body politic against debilitation of its narrative constitution. While  vaccine served as the core treatment for COVID, 'social listening´ served as the foundation of the COVID infodemic vaccine. The interfaces between the conceptual organization of responses to pandemic and infodemic, then, were embedded in WHO’s new approaches to information surveillance and management, and serve as the basis for analysis. .  The first is between an epidemiology of pandemic (physical health) and infodemic (societal health). The second is between epistemological and normative human (social-political-health systems) and virtual (digital, predictive, and generative AI based systems). The third is between epidemiological and normative systems as they interconnect n pandemic. The model and the warning emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.  The start of a resolution appears to blend human and virtual, physical and social threats grounded in  an objective of efficient management through the management of the body (medicine) and the social spirit (narrative).  Social listening, especially as a tool of social epidemiology, begins to reveal its promise and its challenges, eight of which will be sketched out.   

Keywords: social listening; big data/AI; infodemic; misinformation; pandemic; WHO

 

 

This is an age of epidemic, of pandemic, and now of infodemic.  The connection between them—between diseases of the physical body and that of the abstract and victual body politic (or social)—and their mimesis has become more critical to the health of both. The complex of concepts and assumptions embedded in these words—and all of the conditions they signify--have one important element in common. They share a dēmos in common—that is, they share a connection to a place and a people who, in these cases, suffer from a physical or moral pestilence. Indeed, each describes a condition of plague—an equally ancient term--which connotes both a condition of generalized infestation and the act of infiltration.  Each, in its own way, also connotes pestilence--an infection of the body, including the body of the social collective, or something unwholesome, evil (physically and morally)  and noxious. The underlying idea is of something that must be endured and eventually overcome. What the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed, beyond doubt, is the way that each of these X-demics feeds on the others. The interfaces of that feeding produces synergies of pestilence;  in contemporary global society plague marks not just a physical state, but also the moral-social health of the body politic.  

 

These interfaces assume more complicated structures where the virus is virtual and the disease produces physical consequences through the projection of the abstract into human bodies and institutional bodies. This essay, then, considers the concept of infodemic in the digital age. That consideration is undertaken through the prism of the efforts by the World Health Organization (WHO)  and the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) distilled in their framework Report, “How to build an infodemic insights report in six steps” (WHO/UNICEF Report 2023). The aim was to develop a framework for meeting the challenge of infodemic under conditions of pandemic, “specifically aimed at generating rapid and reproducible.

insights to inform a public health response when time is short. (WHO/UNICEF Report 2023, p. 1).

 

The essay starts with a brief consideration of the principal characteristics, the symptoms, of infodemic as developed by WHO.  Second, the essay considers the development of WHO’s approach as a function of the symptoms of infodemic. Third, the essay turns to WHO’s approach as a function of the digital symptomatic data points of infodemic that produce its disease vectors. Fourth, the essay turns to a brief sketching of the consequences of WHO’s approach from a broader digital context. Lastly, concluding remarks suggest both core insights and pathways forward. 

 

1. What is infodemic’s principal characteristics?  We start with a definition. In its WHO/UNICEF Report 2023, frames the term ‘infodemic’ within a multi-factor digital structure. An “infodemic is an overabundance of information, accurate or not, in the digital and physical space, accompanying an acute health event such as an outbreak or epidemic.” (WHO/UNICEF Report, 2023, p. 1). Four important causative elements of infodemic pestilence can be extracted from this definition: First  is that information is the central element of infodemic as plague. Second, is that a measurable quantity of information that exceeds a certain unspecified threshold triggers effects detrimental to the human social organism. Third, is that information combines both analogue and digital sources; the invasive elements exist in physical and virtual spaces. Fourth, is that infodemic is activated, in this instance, in the presence of a health related plague; it is, in effect, constituted in relation to something else of roughly equal magnitude. 

 

We are further told that an infodemic consists of an identifiable set of symptoms. In the language of “How to Build an Infodemic Insights Report in Six Steps,” these consist of  “questions, concerns, information voids (where people seek credible, accurate information but cannot find it), and circulating mis- and disinformation” (WHO/UNICEF Report, 2023, p. 1). Two stand out. One symptom set can be extracted through the iterative processes of questions and concerns. These serve as multi-directional signals that trigger iterative dialectical processes. While it is in the nature of infodemics that affected communities of people have ‘questions and concerns;’ it is also as likely that these questions and concerns then raise questions and concerns among those tasked with combating the informational disfunctions causing infodemic (Spranzi 2011, pp. 11-38).  And the forms of questions and concerns raised also shape the parameters for defining these terms.  These are closely aligned with the modalities of infodemic—the visualization of the spaces within which question-answer dialectics can usefully occur-- content, channel, source (Piltch-Loeb et al. 2023, p. 25 “In the current infodemic, how individuals receive information (channel), who it is coming from (source), and how it is framed can have an important effect on COVID-19 related mitigation behaviors.” Ibid., p. 26). It is in those spaces that one can examine questions and concerns for their potential to generate or spread mis- dis- or mal-information. The questions and concerns are not directed to those seeking to manage infodemic—they are the intersubjective expressions of communities of information producers and consumers. Here one identifies the sources and modalities of infection (Purnat et al. 2021, p. 3-4).

 

A second symptom set are formed within information (or data) voids. These have been defined in turn as “information spaces that lack evidence, into which people searching to check the accuracy of controversial topics can easily fall” (Nature 2024). These may be a more immediate and measurable symptom set—built on references to what “not void” looks like. That, in turn, becomes a function of defining adequate data sets, and identifying corrupting sets (Aslett et al. 2023, p. 550-551). In the case of infodemic it might be reduced to the measurable difference between the totality of information available and the aggregate total of credible and accurate information about the identified topic as a function of (1) its existence, and (2) the measurable difficulty of finding a sufficient quantum of credible accurate information by a hypothetically ordinary person with a defined quantum of ideal training using some equally well defined technology or knowledge.  All of this, of course, is affected by the circulation of MIS, MAL, and DIS-information, which itself constitutes an important symptom and a definitional challenge in context.

 

Its effects on the body politic are dramatic, not just with respect to its formal constitution, but also  with respect to its cross-over effects on health related plague. Its primary effects include “causing information overload and confusion; promoting stigma, eroding trust in health authorities; affecting mental health and negatively influencing health decisions and behaviours.” The severity of these, in turn, may be measured by the difficulty of “health authorities to respond effectively and protect the population’s health.” (WHO/UNICEF Report 2023). Nonetheless the terms are meaningless without a normative context in a specific space, place, and time.

 

2. Is there a medicine to counter the pestilence of infodemic?—“Finding the Signal Through the Noise”. The good news, however, is that there is a medicine for this pestilence—social listening or in the Chinese version social monitoring (社交監聽 (Shèjiāo jiāntīng).  Here again, international organizations appear to be in the vanguard. In their “Finding the Signal Through the Noise” (Cheney, Benjamin, Mechael, 2021), a group of international organizations  sought to provide guidance on the crafting and administration of this social medicine. They put forward the idea of social listening. It is defined as the “regular and systematic aggregation, filtering and monitoring of conversations and public discourse in a combination of traditional media, digital media, off-line and on-line sources of information that represent different populations and geographies” (Ibid., p. 5).  A digital plague must be met with digital measures. A plague, the power of which is in iterative discursive intersubjectivity (Backer 2024), is in its fundamental character also iterative and dialectic; it is necessarily a temporally contextual treatment, and one that is deeply tied to the physical contagion with which it is paired, the way a virtual representation of an object is paired with its physical manifestation (Broekman 2016).  When administered before the onset of physical plague, it can act as a vaccine. Here the focus is on the health of the body politic  as related to the vaccine targeting. Nonetheless it can be administered during the course of the physical disease. In contrast to its use as a vaccine, here the treatment is the administration of medicine whose efficacy is tested against its power to alleviate the physical effects of the plague—info-, epi- or pan-demic. The overall modalities of social listening do not change; what can be refined touch on target and focus, and that is a function of the point at which social listening is deployed on the body politic; and by whom.   What does change are the technologies available for efficient deployment. WHO/UNICEF, for example, focuses on a “taxonomy based summary of computationally identified narratives (e.g., using a social listening taxonomy for linguistic analysis of social media data)” (WHO/UNICEF Report 2023, p. 11).

 

Here one encounters an interesting external linkage—between the self-referencing world of health, on the one hand, and the vibrant markets- and politics-driven world of managing individual and consumer behavior through strategic analysis of, and intervention in, the chatter that constitutes mass sentience.  The technology of social listening has seeped into all sorts of social relations and its use increasingly essential for developing structures of communication between mass society and producers of objects, norms, or social norms. In an August 2023 report, for example, ReportLinker (2023) suggested that the social media listening market was expected to grow from $7.41 billion to $14.21 billion between 2023 and 2028 (ReportLinker 2023). The range of available social listening tools available for purchase or as a service has been growing as well, as have rating protocols offered by companies in the ratings industry (Influencer Marketing Hub 2023). 

 

Social listening itself has become more refined as the power of big data analytics and the freedom to roam of generative AI makes possible more intimate probing of the body politic from out of the chatterings of its components. For example, reporting from Forbes (Kowalewicz 2023) describes the growing salience of sentiment analysis (情感分析), which “involves interpreting and classifying emotions within social media content. It provides insights into public opinion about a brand, product or service by evaluating whether the sentiment behind social media mentions is positive, negative, or neutral” (Ibid.). Aggregated and approached as a dynamic state of flux, it permits both assessment of outlook and a basis for monitoring the effectiveness of interventions designed to produce aggregated changes in attitude. 

 

That characteristic of contextual analysis (of examining disease in place and space and on specific bodies) touches on perhaps the most important manifestation of social listening as a function of infodemic—its variable use as a course of treatment. These are administered by the doctors to the body politic to mitigate the worst effects of an infodemic. Their content is the stuff of politics, science, policy, administrative capability, the premises and limitations of law, and the cultural patterns of social relations in the place where treatment is to be administered.  That in turn reproduces a dialectic between pandemic and infodemic that changes over time as the scope and evolution of information in one vector affects the other. The function, then, of “How to Build an Infodemic Insights Report in Six Steps,” is to provide  a framing structure within which that intersubjective dialectic between pandemic and infodemic can be coordinated, and must evolve.

 

It is in that context that  “How to Build an Infodemic Insights Report in Six Steps,” is informative for revealing the structure of treatment strategies. Those six steps: (1) choose the question; (2) identify and select the data; (3) conduct an integrated analysis; (4) develop strategies; (5) develop an infodemic insights report; and (6) disseminate the IIR and track actions taken. The question in step one is a function of the quantum of information available about pandemic against which the flows of information are measured. Yet the question itself has an ethical objective—moving a population toward an appropriate consideration of curated information that would suggest a particular conclusion: in the case of COVID, about the necessity and value of vaccination, for example. The data in step two focuses on the aggregation of “information” both to be advanced and those to be countered as they flow through the critical discursive sites in which social realities (and their imaginaries) exist. Here the dialectic of the question can be operationalized only through the technologies of big data, and perhaps of automated decision-making. The flows of information, given relevant decision and response time frames, require technology to make inward projection into these flows possible.  That identification, though, also turns  the dialectic outward—from that between pandemic and infodemic, to that between the narratives spun from internal dialectics (in this case that of institutionalized health organs) to that emerging from external dialectics (that is popular and anarchic in the sense that there is no single guiding center) flowing in and through communication platforms (virtual/digital as well as analogue) (Backer 2023). The third step brings the overarching guidance of expertise into the structures. Just as medical doctors and researchers produce data of disease from which conclusions and preferred treatments are adjudged sound, so in the circulatory system within which the virus of MIS, MAL- and DIS- information may circulate the doctors of narrative may seek to align the analysis, remises, and conclusions from pandemic to the circulatory system of ideas, expectations and assumptions through which bodies politic and social make choices. But here the challenge: analytics requires a coordinated view and where those who seek to guide are themselves divided (but politics, strategic diversions, and controversies over evidentiary foundations) this step may prove much harder to effectively realize.

 

The problem of consensus (the essence of the challenges of step three, finds its way into step four’s strategies for intervention. In the circulatory systems of infodemic that is most likely molded to the character of the part of the narrative circulatory systems through which intervention may be required. Here, as in pandemic, the challenges of penetration that is effective, and that produces the desired internal reaction (antibodies in physical and narrative bodies) without damaging the system, becomes the key objective.  And again, in the system of virtual realities those are a function of the premises, imaginaries, and objectives, of those tasked with the alignment.  It also reinforces the caution of trustworthiness where the integration is driven by the imaginaries shaping pandemic responses, which themselves evolve (as they did during the COVID pandemic) (Cf., Radulescu, Williams, and Cavanaugh 2020; Bratianu and Benjinaru  2021). This was particularly acute as strategies diverged between lockdown and diffusion strategies each of which would affect the scope of definition of MIS-, DIS-, and MAL- information subsets (Cf., Gallic, Lubrano, and Michel  2022). It applied less, to vaccination information universes, though.  The last two steps may  produce the greatest challenges—construct, circulate and evaluate. The difficulty is not conceptual as it is administrative and technological.  The administrative challenge comes from the difficulty of developing pathways for projection of strategies  among identified key stakeholders.  The technological problem is built around the need for speed and the iterative dialectic of intervention in a circulatory system the virtual flow of which may be beyond the human capacity to manage—and thus requiring the ethically charged consideration of autonomous machine driven intervention. Here infodemic meets the contemporary dialectic of ethical AI (European Commission 2018).

 

One can, in this way, better understand the connection between the WHO framing and its connection to the doctoring of the circulatory system of the body politic—its narrative and narrative pathways. The “How to Build” text applies this in its definition of narrative (Ibid., p. iv). Narrative points to the health of the body politic as a function of the proper operation of its circulatory system which is made up of narrative and is itself the paths through which narrative travels:

 

In infodemic management context, narratives are units of analysis because they embed

meaning, values and emotions that can explain how people understand and share pieces of information. These embedded components of a narrative can be hijacked or can blend with mis- and disinformation narratives which can divert people’s attention into inaccurate understanding and interpretation of information.(“How to Build” p. iv).

 

Narrative is not just the pathways and linkages within which information may be processed and delivered to the masses, and back again.  Narrative is also a bacillus, a virus, an object that can infect the body politic and cause harm. That is the harm that amplifies the parallel harm to physical bodies in epi- and pandemic.