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| Members of the County Council joining over video chat participate in the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of a council meeting at the St. Louis County Council Chambers in Clayton, Mo., Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2021. Public forums before local school boards and city councils are the latest source of misinformation about COVID-19 |
The latest video to go viral features a local physician who
made several misleading claims about COVID-19 while addressing the Mount Vernon
Community School Corporation in Fortville, Indiana, on Aug. 6. In his 6-minute
remarks, Dr. Dan Stock tells the board that masks don't work, vaccines don't
prevent infection, and state and federal health officials don't follow the
science.
The video has amassed tens of millions of online views, and
prompted the Indiana State Department of Health to push back. Stock did not
return multiple messages seeking comment.
"Here comes a doctor in suspenders who goes in front of
the school board and basically says what some people are thinking: the masks
are B.S., vaccines don’t work and the CDC is lying — it can be very compelling
to laypeople,” said Dr. Zubin Damania, a California physician who received so
many messages about the Indiana clip that he created his own video debunking
Stock’s claims.
Damania hosts a popular online medical show under the name
ZDoggMD. His video debunking Stock's comments has been viewed more than 400,000
times so far. He said that while there are legitimate questions about the
effectiveness of mask requirements for children, Stock’s broad criticism of
masks and vaccines went too far.
YouTube removed several similar videos of local government
meetings in North Carolina, Missouri, Kansas and Washington state. In
Bellingham, Washington, officials responded by temporarily suspending public
comment sessions.
The false claims in those videos were made during the
portion of the meeting devoted to public comment. Local officials have no
control over what is said at these forums, and say that’s part of the point.
In Kansas, YouTube pulled video of the May school board
meeting in the 27,000-student Shawnee Mission district in which parents and a
state lawmaker called for the district to remove its mask mandate, citing
“medical misinformation.”
The district, where a mask mandate remains in effect,
responded by ending livestreaming of the public comment period. District
spokesman David Smith acknowledged that it has been challenging to balance
making the board meetings accessible and not spreading fallacies.
“It was hard for me to hear things in the board meeting that
weren’t true and to know that those were going out without contradiction,”
Smith said. “I am all about free speech, but when that free speech endangers
people’s lives, it is hard to sit through that.”
After hearing from local officials, YouTube reversed its
decision and put the videos back up. Earlier this month the company, which is
owned by Google, announced a change to its COVID misinformation policy to allow
exceptions for local government meetings — though YouTube may still remove
content that uses remarks from public forums in an attempt to mislead.
“While we have clear policies to remove harmful COVID-19
misinformation, we also recognize the importance of organizations like school
districts and city councils using YouTube to share recordings of open public
forums, even when comments at those forums may violate our policies,” company
spokeswoman Elena Hernandez said.
The deluge of false claims about the virus has challenged
other platforms too. Twitter and Facebook each have their own policies on
COVID-19 misinformation, and say that like YouTube they attach labels to
misleading content and remove the worst of it.
Public comment sessions preceding local government meetings
have long been known for sometimes colorful remarks from local residents. But
before the internet, if someone were to drone on about fluoride in the drinking
water, for instance, their comments weren't likely to become national news.
Now, thanks to the internet and social media, the misleading
musings of a local doctor speaking before a school board can compete for
attention with the recommendations of the CDC.
It was only a matter of time before misleading comments at
these local public forums went viral, according to Jennifer Grygiel, a
communications professor at Syracuse University who studies social media
platforms.
Grygiel suggested a few possible ways to minimize the impact
of misinformation without muzzling local governments. Grygiel said clear labels
on government broadcasts would help viewers understand what they’re watching.
Keeping the video on the government’s website, instead of making it shareable
on YouTube, could allow local residents to watch without enabling the spread of
videos more widely.
“Anytime there is a public arena – a city council hearing, a
school board meeting, a public park – the public has the opportunity to
potentially spread misinformation,” Grygiel said. “What’s changed is it used to
stay local.”