 Hello and welcome to this online event from the AusPNG network here at the Lowy Institute. My name is Shane McLeod, I'm the project director here at the network. We're coming to you today from the Lowy Institute headquarters in Bly Street, Sydney, which is on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and we acknowledge and pay tribute to the traditional owners, their elders and leaders past, present and emerging. The AusPNG network receives funding from Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and we thank DFAT for its ongoing support. Also I'd like to acknowledge our network event program sponsors Bank South Pacific BSP and Coca-Cola Euro-Pacific Partners Australia, until recently known as Coca-Cola Amatil. Now if you've been staying connected with us over the past few months, you'll know we've been focusing our events on COVID-19 and its impact in Papua New Guinea. Since February, PNG has really been copying the brunt of a major surge in the pandemic and that's had a big impact on the health system and on the broader community. Back in April, we caught up with Health Minister Gelta Wong to talk through how the country has been responding to the pandemic and again last month we were able to bring together a discussion about the response in provincial centres and one topic that keeps coming up in our discussions is the issue of information and how that affects the pandemic response. There's concern about conspiracy theories, about misinformation, fake news and miracle cures each of which are to some extent undermining public awareness of the virus, the public response to the virus and the success of control measures, as well as the just-launched national vaccine rollout. Minister Wong expressed concern about it, talking about online experts. Provincial health workers talk about dealing with it when people come in for treatment but disagree with health professionals because they've read or watched something online. Which is why we've organised today's event, to talk about the challenges of online misinformation in PNG, to talk about some potential areas to focus on as the country's pandemic response evolves. To do that, we're going to be helped by two people who've been spending a lot of time looking at exactly this issue. Joyce Eggins and Dr Prashant Pillay are researchers with the Australian Broadcaster ABC and its project in PNG, the Media Development Initiative. This last year they've been focusing their research to understand the spread of online misinformation and how it affects the public conversation around health in PNG. And I'm pleased to say they're able to share some of that research with us today. So over to you Joyce and Prashant, what can you tell us about your research and what you've been finding out about online misinformation? Thank you Shane and it's good to be here and thank you for inviting us. Here with my colleague Joyce to present to you our latest installment of the Kurtby Infodemic Research and Misinformation. So it's based on addressing COVID-19 uncertainties emerging in PNG Facebook conversations. I'll just give you a bit of context first to what we explored. So we're looking at the objectives, methodologies and limitations first before Joyce and I will sort of delve in more detail to the key findings. And so the fundamental objective of this study was really to understand key themes in COVID-19 discussions on Facebook, resulting in misinformation and confusion amongst PNG audiences. And we've sort of focused on a specific timeline from January to April 2021. We have the intended outcome programmed as to inform PNG journalists and communication practitioners to produce relevant content to address misinformation. So that's the practical application that we hope to achieve with this research. It should be mentioned that this research is a third installment. We have two previous installments and the first was done March to April 2020. And there were some interesting findings coming out of that one given that it was a start towards the start of the pandemic. And one sort of included audience confusion around what misinformation entails. And it also showed that there were different understandings of how media should address unverified information. So there's quite a bit of discussion on Facebook around that. And the second tracker we sort of implemented from May to June 2020. And this really showed, the findings really showed, the preeminence of conspiracy theories for the first time, sort of surface. And there was references to the establishment of a new world order. And the perception or the misconception that COVID-19 was possibly a man-made virus. So we were starting to see a greater sort of solidifying of these conspiracy theories. And it was also sort of concrete appeals for more clear data around COVID-19. So now we transition to the January and April part of the research. And just move to the next slide. In terms of methodology, more than 36,391 posts were analyzed across 18 Facebook groups. And we sort of automated the process with a combination of Python software programming and sort of a customized concordant software as well. And it just was nothing that the main unit of analysis for our entire research was a number of references made in relation to each team in the research. And just for your knowledge, a reference to a theme is a unique instance when part of a post or its entry team sort of highlights a broader theme. So it does not necessarily equate to the number of posts to say. And just some contextual observations more broadly. For this research, for this installment, we found that misinformation was predominantly identified in Facebook comments, responding to news reports on COVID-19 and vaccines. So these were comments in response to a primary post either published by a media news organization or a specific community. It should be noted that we've only analyzed public Facebook where the data was sort of accessible to all. We also found there was a strong public distrust and suspicion surrounding institutional support for vaccines and the compounding that there were 25% more posts now relative to the same last year about PNG being a vaccine trial site. And we'll go into more detail on how this sort of developed and subsequent slides. And there's some limitations just very quickly. Obviously, due to our resource constraints, only English posts were analyzed for this research. And as most of you know, trends are highly volatile from week to week in any social media analysis. So they should be sort of analyzed or rather interpreted in context to the time that we sort of sample this data. And again, a small sample relatively of popular Facebook groups were analyzed. And they were based on reach numbers. And we've had extensive consultations where the NBI team and Joyce was leading those just to sort of pick out and identify the key Facebook groups that will be analyzing. And finally, should be mentioned that Facebook comments to posts were only analyzed for posts with a high engagement rate. So we're looking at posts where looking at comments or posts where there was a clear discursive value and a clear strong level of discussion that we could extract themes and thematic relevance from. Just moving on to the key insights very quickly. And one of the key dominant themes was around unsubstantiated claims of PNG as a vaccine trial site. So there was contrival discussion on PNG being used as a trial site to explore the full effects, especially of the AstraZeneca vaccine. And there was a general sentiment that pharmaceutical companies and international governments were using PNG as sort of a test case amongst other countries to understand vaccine side effects in associated medical complications. There was also unsubstantiated claims that the World Health Organization and was part of sort of a broader conspiracy to organize sporadic trials on vaccine efficacy in PNG communities. So it should be noted that 45% of posts also carry links to globally reported cases of blood clotting with the AstraZeneca vaccine. But what's interesting is that these references to posts and the sharing of posts from major news organizations such as articles from the Guardian or the ABC or the Herald Sun were often decontextualized from the actual editorial intent of these posts. So information was then misappropriated to sort of further a specific agenda as well. And that's something we found was a common theme and particularly in this sample. So generally there was public distress in a lot of pharmaceutical companies, international governments, as I said, including the WHO, just around vaccine purpose and efficacy. Just sort of moving on to the next slide and the next theme. What we also found was there was widespread misinformation and confusion around the purpose of vaccines and its impact on the immune system. So these were more sort of scientific misconceptions of what vaccines were supposed to do in the role they were supposed to serve. And there were three main typologies as to how this situation was articulated. So I'll just sort of go through them quite briefly. The first misconception was that vaccines should not have any side effects. So post this question, why vaccines were still being administered when they were publicly known side effects? With many stating that properly researched or manufactured vaccines should not have any of those side effects. And these claims were frequently voiced on the back of reports that were produced around the time P&J announced its acquisition of the AstraZeneca vaccine. I think that was around March 9th. The other misconception that we also sort of identified was that one should only be vaccinated upon receiving a positive COVID-19 test. So here we found identified unsustainable claims that vaccines are meant to cure COVID-19 patients. And it was sort of people who often had a polarised view on this and this sort of univerically equated vaccines to sort of curing the pandemic in some respects. And finally, the third misconception that we sort of highlighted was that individuals who were vaccinated, who were vaccinated, that need not take any further health precautions. And this was really in relation to vaccinated politicians in P&J who were criticised in post for actually wearing masks. And many sort of interpreted that as a sign of weakness or the sign that the vaccine was not actually working as intended. And a lot of narratives were sort of based on that into sort of criticising the actual role of vaccines in the first place. So right now, I've sort of completed two major themes, but I'll just transition over and pass over to my colleague who will be able to sort of bring you through some of the remaining themes with more granular localised detail as well. Thank you. Thank you Prashant. I'll let you manage the controls on the slide over there. And I will speak to the next slide here. So we observed widespread criticism against church leaders who got the vaccination. They were seen as betraying their religious beliefs and their values. So under this theme, more than half of the posts believe that announcements by church leaders on taking the vaccine amounted to propaganda and as a way of seeking government validation. So John Rebert, a prelator of the Roman Catholic Church in P&J, was viewed as a key figure in promoting the vaccine. And just moving on to the next slide now. Following from the findings of last year's tracker, there was a substantial number of posts on the effectiveness of home remedies in curing COVID-19. Remedies included steam baths, lemon ginger garlic drinks and hot water. Most of these comments were responding to mainstream media news stories on COVID-19 vaccination rollout plans. So on to the next slide, news reports specifically on COVID-19 misinformation on social media were widely disregarded as baseless and again gender driven. Media outlets such as the National Broadcasting Corporation and Post Korea have posted articles on the public health dangers of subscribing to COVID-19 misinformation. Most of these stories have been publicly criticized by posters as pandering to government pressure. So I'll hand over to Prashant again to look at the supplementary findings. Thank you so much Joyce. Just in terms of these supplementary findings that we talked worth sort of highlighting. So we found there were only four instances where page administrators of our sample of Facebook groups intervened to moderate instances of misinformation and all four instances were actually from NBC News. Now what we've seen is from past installments of the research we've actually seen a gradual decline in terms of moderation generally across the board. While this research has uncovered the reasons as to why there was less intervention from a management point of view in terms of managing quality information, it does show that it becomes increasingly more challenging towards controlling the flow towards sort of managing the flow information once there's a sort of a large sample of posts that go online. So the second observation was that whilst not major team there was considerable number of posts highlighting the perceived absence of expert discussion in the media by qualified PNG based scientists and medical practitioners on the vaccine and related side effects. Now this was an observation based on our sample whether this is sort of an actual fact in reality again it's up for debate but it was definitely sort of a sense that could be perhaps a stronger representative voice from the local scientific community based in PNG to correct these misconceptions more publicly. And the third sort of finding was that the supplementary finding was that there was an upwards trajectory in a number of posts relating to PNG as a vaccine trial site in the month of May showing that this team if you look at it from a longitudinal perspective continues to sort of dominate within the sampled mainstream social media conversations. So now that we would expect to see the predominance of these team perhaps in a month in a month after based on current trends if we would sort of do a predictive graph in that sense. So in terms of just summarizing this very quickly enjoy feel free to share my time here but these were some of the main points so there was firstly we looked at unsubstantiated claims of PNG as a vaccine trial site we looked at also the confusional medical role of vaccines and how you know that has affected sort of clear scientific communication there was also this joy set sort of covered in detail criticisms leveled against vaccinated church leaders sort of emerging trend there was unsubstantiated claims of form remedy chaos and this was something that we identified even in the last two installments of the research so that's one consistent team across the board and finally as Joyce mentioned as well there was public disagreement around social media's role in perpetuating misinformation and perhaps from a media practice point of view this is perhaps most in a way most concerning given that there seems to be an active effort required in terms of correcting how people construe misinformation how they define misinformation and what can be done in a more larger scale. Thank you that's sort of the basis of our main research and again we're very glad to present it to you all today thank you. Prashant thanks so much for that that's there's so much for us to talk about there I've got questions I've lots of questions but you might have some watching remotely as well the the if you're joining us on zoom the Q&A function is enabled you'd be able to lodge your questions there and later in the hour we'll be able to come to some of your questions as well but this is a good time to bring in our other two panelists because there is lots to talk about first I'll bring in Dr Gary now who's the senior doctor and the provincial liaison and EMT lead with the P&G National Control Centre for COVID-19 good to see you there Gary thanks for joining us all right good day good day thank you and no worries and Belinda Cora is joining us as well good day Belinda secretary of the media council of P&G a very well-known journalist in P&G and someone dealing with these information issues every day so thanks for being there Belinda and I'm going to join you there as well look first question I might actually come to you Gary because you are dealing with this day-to-day as a frontline healthcare professional what impact is misinformation having for people like you doctors in emergency wards dealing with patients coming through the door what what do you see yeah so thank you um the misinformation is rampant and as the presentation is clearly showed the misinformation across all mediums of media especially the social media and the types of misinformation are quite scary the range of information and the accessibility to it people's reactions to it and then how the general perception of the public is to it let alone health workers perception towards the misinformation um we can have a health worker population that has a lot of hesitancy towards the vaccination programs already um if the health workers don't get it the general public they're not going to get it and a lot of the misinformation that was shared on the presentation um I actually interviewed uh over a hundred health workers in SEDC each European before the before the vaccination uh before the vaccines arrived just to gauge if the acceptance was there and the results are similar to what's been said and all of the fears that you mentioned they are quite evident um in that little survey I did as well right down to now we are looking at the inputting numbers that um we saw recently with the surge we're thankful that the surge is now settled down in Port Moresby there are little surges that are happening across the country a low acceptance of vaccination and then the end then the potential for surges that will happen in the country there are low acceptance of the non-pharmaceutical interventions as well in the general public it's a scary outlook for us as health workers um I might jump in and get Belinda to talk to us about this as well Belinda you're a journalist you've been working in the pange media for nearly two decades uh what I found interesting about what Prasanth and and Joyce just presented is that its news stories being shared that are the basis for people then spreading the misinformation is that a surprise to you um you realized that while the presentation was on I was actually uh nodding my head because it was actually true I've been the media council of Papua New Guinea is very concerned not only are we trying to um the mainstream media is trying to overcome its own challenges in the newsroom during this pandemic because it has forced its staff and its itself and the editors themselves to try and look into the another threat that has just popped up in the last three to four months and that is the misinformation then it is a concern for the council not only because of that but because um uh reporters themselves need help but only are they trying to understand the virus itself and also trying to speak to experts they're also faced with the challenges so or trying to get in experts on time trying to you know analyze what they want to do today for COVID angle tomorrow for COVID angle and speak to experts who can be able to counter some of these uh the comments that are being made I'm happy to note that MTV NBC have been post career especially uh I've been pushing for their online stories and writing more of it trying to ensure writing more factual stories around COVID and the vaccines trying to ensure that they try to counter it but it's it's it's work in progress it's not an easy task yeah Joyce in in your presentation you talked about um Cardinal Ribat and the fact that prominent community leaders who come out and talk about COVID talk about vaccinations are then caught up and uh have sort of claimed to be as part of the conspiracy what do you think is driving that what what what is driving people to sort of wrap people into those kind of misinformation topics it's probably the sort of overwhelming the narratives around that hesitancy to take the vaccine and the myths around COVID that's manifesting in sort of the sources that people trust for information are now becoming sort of bled on people like when you look at church leaders and churches themselves they are among the most interested sources of information for a lot of rural communities and that and when you when you have arguments on platforms like social media where not a lot of sort of grassroots communities get onto you have that group there who are talking about it and having these discussions around sort of the vaccination and COVID-19 and you have church leaders who come out and and say look take the vaccine it's good for you it'll protect you against the virus that I guess with all that conversation that's going on around social media it I think it adds to the the doubts that's now sort of growing among different sources of information including the churches and Gary back to you like when when this happens when community figures get wrapped up in some of this misinformation just by having spoken about an issue does it turn people off like do you have among your colleagues are people reluctant to be seen speaking in public about some of these issues yes admittedly even myself because of social media attacks and risks of security issues and all of that that parent in the community we we are a bit hesitant to speak about issues that like vaccine hesitancy and all of that because the attacks we face but it is important that we do it's our shared responsibility that has leaders in the health field we need to stand up for information that's right in the most safest options for our community need to get as opposed to the misinformation out there so we have to fight the battle even I face the hesitancy but I have to do my bit as well come out in the media speak and then do the public relations outreach and all of that because it's important we need to lead and every community leader and every health worker in the country they need to take this on board and take it as their responsibility Prashant can I come back to you sorry to interrupt Gary but I'll come back to Prashant because I'm interested to know if if the it's essentially in the comments on we're talking about on Facebook here we're talking about comments in relation to posts perhaps from news outlets or from the government something like that is it organized is it I guess what you'd almost call a drive by comment where one person sees a post and says one thing and leaves it or are you seeing sustained efforts or sustained campaigns by people against some of the information that's out there great question so we actually did a more granular level of analysis to just sort of identify do any patents in terms of who the types of accounts that were sort of disseminating this sort of misinformation and what we found was in total there were about 112 accounts that were constant consistently featuring sources of misinformation and they've been sort of we've sort of allocated them by frequency levels and we found that these 112 have at least been responsible for 20 or more posts in the comment section so it's a significant number and a group enough to actually obviously enough from a statistical point of view to shift public perception on key health response issues and something that needs to be sort of addressed quite immediately. Linda something I've noticed is there have been some people who have connections say to the medical or scientific community who have commented on some of these issues and and get a lot of prominence I was wondering if you might comment on that that that situation where people who might have a connection to science or health perhaps who say something in public or comment on issues maybe not directly related to their expertise but get a lot of prominence and compare that to your capacity as a journalist to access the people who are very busy dealing with the pandemic right now I mean how do you go in terms of getting access to experts and how do you go filtering the people who might I guess appear to be experts. The media council realized and we've actually had a meeting on the weekend myself and the president and the vice president that it's only because of the issue that our members are actually faced with and it's it's it's something that as a journalist when we started off March last year covering COVID-19 I realized that we had and what and I'm just pertaining back to what Gary Know had just mentioned we had quite a number of experts that we could speak to scientific people who are studying viruses he in the country former institute of medical research experts you know we have a lot of them here and we were managing to get in touch with them not myself only but the rest of the media and then all of a sudden they just went quiet like they didn't answer our calls I was trying to understand why that was the case that that started as soon as we started to see the second surge of cases here in the country and trying to get them on a very busy schedule especially when during the time when the cases were rising and not only input most with the rest of the country it's pretty much difficult they give us a timing but when we called it at specific time the next day they were shifted doing something else and then another confusion came about when we had contradictory opinions from our own experts that made it quite difficult for our reporters to try and grasp because we're reporters we're not experts you know so we were very dependent on opinions and people who study viruses and of course who it is new we understand that he's always changing but at least getting an expert on time was was very much difficult unless you could be able to me to continuously checking on them that's what I was basically doing I know that really get tired and I know Dr. Gary know what tired of me but at the end of the day I had to do my job and as Mr. Dr. Gary now said he also had a role to play and it's about time that people understand especially all those in authorities how important the role of media is in trying to disseminate information and the experts who were able to understand that and grasp that was making life easier for us this journalist by picking up the phone and answering our whatsapp or answering my call that's basically how it was helping my story when I was you know trying to put out a story without having an expert opinion it just didn't seem right I felt it was not justice for people who needed the information and not only just the information and update on the number of cases but explaining to them what this vaccine will do to you and how many cases we're having now and what's the risks we face what are the risks we face that can't come from me that needs to come from the experts and I'm just a platform providing that so we always had to be reminded of that and more importantly that has been a challenge for many generals who have been covering COVID so far and that is ensuring that we have that expert voice as clearly highlighted in in the research and I think I'll come back to this question of experts and who are the best people to be communicating some of these messages but I wanted to jump back to something that came from Joyce and Prasanth's presentation earlier around moderation you mentioned that there'd been a few examples of moderation you were able to find but I also know just from moderating our own Facebook page here at the Institute moderating social media is a massive challenge it's a huge effort but I'm interested and I don't know if it's something for you Joyce or Prasanth how can it feasibly work in terms of that social media space how can you manage that flow of commentary that flow of information which is driving a lot of the misinformation where does the responsibility lie do you think maybe Joyce if you'd like to talk about that first that's a full-time job to be moderating online on especially on Facebook where most of our media sort of reaching an audience and audience commenting I think we saw to some degree an attempt to moderate the conversations but I think as I said it is a full-time job but does need someone to sit there and actually think through the comments they're coming through and especially if they're generating more and more comments to have someone also have information that's accurate on hand to counter and these are the types of people who also need I guess access to support such as how to look at the integrity of the information and how to respond respectfully diplomatically still sort of encouraging engagement and dialogue but presenting also countering with accurate information and sources for going to it that is the struggle sometimes with media organizations because they don't all have sort of the human resources in the capital to do that and that is an area I think should be looked at as well to support media organizations to sort of have someone there full-time to moderate their online spaces and especially Facebook and there's also this we use a lot of WhatsApp in the country and there's a lot of information flowing through that space as well and then it comes through onto Facebook or vice versa and so even where media organizations are reaching out to their sort of audience listener group so whatever through the WhatsApp to be really sort of careful about how and what kind of information is going in and out of their closed groups or pages. Gary I imagine from the pandemic control side of things that the National Control Centre these information issues are a massive challenge in terms of capacity does does PNG's government does the department have the ability to put the type of resources in like that that could I guess provide almost like an online on-demand interactive service it just seems like such a huge ask when you're thinking about all the other tasks that you're managing at the moment with the pandemic what do you think is feasible. I think with the pandemic response from the National Control Centre what's actually happened is we've actually restructured our response mechanism so that the communication team are all but and cluster bundled together and they cross multi clusters so you've got under the communications team you will have non-functional interventions new processing and media communications and all and and print another me and UNICEF and all of them will come under the same one big cluster that handles all of them together this the social media platform moderation is one thing that is highlighted almost daily and we're monitoring looking at different you know misinformation and also good and bad information that pops up on Facebook and this is we do address it at our level but then again the pages and the moderations are with we don't actually have our national coordination center and put out information they do to an extent but it's not the main source of our information coming out the WHO Papua New Guinea site and the National Department of Health site are moderated separately and they they moderate their own sites and then they put out information as well but from our point of view over the last month we've restructured and we're moving forward towards a more cross level communication structure that bundles all the communication together so we have one streamlined message and we everybody preaches the same thing so there's no you know confusion about what we're talking about and with different opinions everyone should understand the same subject matter and especially going out into the media everybody should be to be having the same party like if you and me use the term yeah thanks Gary so I want to talk about experts and this this challenge that I think is inherent in some of the social media sharing of expertise because if people are being caught up you know being wrapped up in conspiracy theories because they comment on things how do you cut through that who are the experts who would have the most cut through Belinda might come back to you and just from the journalistic perspective who do you think have been at the effective communicators with the public around COVID-19 and what are the things that you think are the the skills that people need in communicating some of these challenges the number of committed experts I've been able to talk to and have been easily accessible by the media in the country I think the the deputy controller that's around downy I know he's been a very busy person in the last couple of months but he's been able to come out strong findings and statistics and because he says has access to WHO and also the health department and also PHAs around the country has been able to please give us opinions and of course views in relation to different angles to COVID especially during the rollout and of course COVID virus itself. I've also seen Dr. Yoko Pua at the Port Mosa Journal Hospital assisting the media we've also had one or two female doctors also Mary Baguita and also Dr. Candino from Port Mosa Journal Hospital have been able to also speak with us and you also have Dr. Glenn Mola who has been able to speak with the media and I think those are for now those are the only people I can think of that we have been able to speak to us more openly about the role they play maybe because they've been given that permission to do so at that level or they see within their role that it is important to talk to us about issues surrounding COVID and vaccines and what's even more important is that the reporters that are interviewing them understand what they want to get from them which is also another challenge in itself understanding what's happening on the social media front what's trending before you even ask a question is also very very very important because it enables you to write for relevance you know what's what's currently happening in Papua New Guinea and when you talk about mainstream media I think a lot of people tend to forget that we're quite small and we're trying to penetrate to the whole country and it is not easy. I've known that in the last couple of months and also in the years of my my experience in the country while reporting is word of mouth seems to be more faster than mainstream especially in the rural areas then also in the urban cities and that's been something that even I had to deal with with my own relatives who are already not only showing you know the perspective of their own opinions in family gatherings because Belinda Quora is there so it is really really challenging personally and it's also challenging when when trying to report about it factually and ensuring that you know you consider that everyone doesn't have the same opinions as the experts you're speaking to and that has been something that I've had to counter. Gary just back to you something we were talking about off stage before we started the event today was the idea of what other community leaders are persuasive and help to build health messaging who do you think can contribute in this space I mean we briefly talked about sports figures perhaps it's church figures who do you think can help build the health messaging. Thank you so the health messaging at the moment is more nationally based and and more broader community based in provincial levels and all of that and it also needs to be contextualized down to the grassroots level as well and taking these health messages right down to them so they understand why it's important or why after vaccination what's the light at the end of the tunnel and what's the after you get vaccinated why do you need to wear a mask for a month or why do you need to wait for everyone else to get vaccinated before you can take the mask off and and all of that understanding has to go down filter right down to the community level and just rushing along you can I'll just jump straight to the point that is in you know families in our the conversations are shared around the dinner cables and in the small communities and usually the head of the household is the one that dictates to the to the household I mean what's the direction for us as a family I know it's difficult to to see but we've got to really account at that level and and address the information on a personal level to individuals and then on a family level to families messaging towards families and then messaging towards communities and and involving community leaders in in structures that are already existing we're not going to recreate the wheel and and and try to use systems that are that we plan to build new we have political figures like the governor for NCD Honourable Power Spockle he's got a big political machinery behind him and he's got community leaders in each single little community in in nine mile settlement in eight mile settlement in all of Muslim and those community leaders are the ones we bring in reeducate and we teach them about COVID-19 and they take that message back and they start telling their communities and their little it's gonna take time um and I'm not sure how much time we have on our side but it's gonna happen if we want to win this battle against misinformation and getting the right messaging out there and even just telling people where to get the correct information from don't believe this and don't believe this and that that should happen from people which they see every day as leaders to them and even to the health professionals is there's no good me standing in front of the media and saying what I think should happen with COVID because I'm only known to select group of people and I to my patients at Gero Hospital for instance they would see me around and they would trust me because I'm their doctor daily um but uh the doctor there's a surgeon in in Gorka General Hospital for the emergency physician Dr Aaron would would see patients every day and him coming out in the media to the eastern highlands community they would know if they would trust and that would be very effective might be one of the challenges is for health professionals in P&G is helping them helping them to find ways to communicate and maybe it is through online um you know online media social media in smaller contexts I'm aware of the time I'm aware that we've got some fantastic questions coming in and a really big audience out there so I'd like to get to as many as we can um I'm just having a look here there's a good one I'll kick off with from Yambari Haihui at Transparency P&G G'day um for Belinda the spread of misinformation seems to be an indication of widespread public distrust in national institutions so how can journalists be supported to rebuild some of that institutional trust we'd appreciate your thoughts on that um thank you very much um I think from TAPNG Yambari for that question very interesting question I'm not sure how I'm going to answer that but I'll try my best um we're putting a lot of pressure on you with this one that that is true that we've been reading a lot of comments in relation to especially online on Facebook especially to do with news stories from different agencies different line of departments that are responsible in the response in Covid what we've actually done and what I've seen other media houses do when they do get um you know the the the comments in relation to the public um questioning the role are these statistics true um if we really have this number a number of deaths um where is the money is in relation to Covid-19 been spent um yes that is true that there is a it is trust and that I cannot deny when I'm reading on comments uh what is very important for us to do and what we must continue to do is to fight and to continue to write the stories that need to be told um and that has not been easy for us as a mainstream media um but we will continue to um pursue um a lot of our outstanding follow-ups and we'll continue to pull the people that need to be answerable and responsible for everything that is surrounding the response of Covid and Papua New Guinea and I think it's working progress for the media um I think we'll need to continue to do that in the next couple of months so that's all I can say for now thanks Belinda now I just I'll just flag that we've lost Gary so I won't be able to ask Gary any questions until we can hopefully get him back into the call but in the meantime I'll throw one in Joyce's direction this is from Corinne Podger who's watching us I think from down here in Sydney and the question is is criticism being expressed on social platforms for example of the church leaders who've been vaccinated do you think that is resulting in an actual decline in people's intention to get vaccinated in vaccination rates yeah I can't say for sure if that would sort of translate to people not getting the vaccination but it does influence that conversation to a certain degree I think over many years communities in PNG have sort of been sustained through either the one talk system the church network system and so there's still a large element of trust in church leaders and in the church itself the overwhelming conversation as I said in the beginning is sort of on that platform and whether or not it manifests in people not getting the vaccination is it's something I cannot say for sure or comment on but it does influence the conversations in places where people have access to sort of Facebook and can also influence the conversations that may happen off Facebook yeah I can see we've got Gary back online so it might be a good one I can also put to him and Gary you've you were not online when I was asking this one of Joyce but do you worry that the commentary about public figures and the criticism when they get vaccinations do you worry that that is leading to a decline in overall vaccination rates or intention of people to get vaccinated yes it's my wife I just spoke of apologies but yes it is a big worry because these are chosen leaders and they are vaccination heroes they are taking the front foot and taking the lead to take the vaccination and it's almost like we can't do anything right in the eyes of the public with the amount of lack of trust that they've lost for the response over the year and it's unfortunate that the leaders now that are taking the vaccine and that are coping the brunt of the mistrust that's in the community but it worries me because then it affects the vaccine update and it counters all our efforts to get people vaccinated Prashanth I'll throw one your way this is sort of based on a question from Kimberley Gardner who asks about the need for a mass communications campaign to address misperceptions and misleading information in what you've seen through the research are some messages cutting through better than others and do you think there are any signs of what would be an effective way to to communicate at a sort of a mass media level question there's online misinformation that research was focused on there are three sort of areas that could be addressed just in terms of the first I think would be just addressing instances where accurate information is actually posted as well too often we have to focus on instances where you know there's misinformation but actually loudening conversations that are perhaps logical and then based on evidence should also feature in a lot of mass communication campaigns as well and I think the focus should also be too prone when you're looking at social media you look at the false information and negative information you remove them but also in terms there needs to be a concerted attention towards communicating accurate information as well often we are too focused on removing misinformation and sort of correct and sort of you know implying that something is false but what is the alternative and where can you get truthful narrative out there you know to balance it out so I think it's sort of a it's a balancing game when you think of it in a mass communication sort of paradigm great thanks Prashant I've got one here from Sean Dornie good day Sean thanks for tuning in today he asked if there's been an effort to get Justin Olam to urge people to get vaccinated would he also find himself caught up in conspiracy theories what do you reckon Gary would Justin Olam help get people vaccinated uh yes Justin Olam's already done a video for us um he's already been approached and uh I think Justin Olam's above uh about such criticism Ragmilling is so popular here it's it's crazy it's crazy the Ragmilling stars are almost immune to this well it can definitely help I think build a bit of momentum all right next question um one here from Anne Kruger and I might send this one your way Belinda um how confident do you think reporters are in dealing with misinformation online and do they need more support to identify and respond and I might also get you Joyce to respond after Belinda on that one yes very very important question it comes to misinformation I must point out that the council had realized that a lot of our reporters definitely need a lot of help we have a lot of young health reporters who have been pushed to cover the pandemic all of a sudden without enough weapons to arm themselves especially how to ask the questions they need to ask and trying to analyze information and put out to the public so it is very very vital that our newsrooms get that help the council at this time is working with partners like the UN, WHO and the National Coordination Center to start holding trainings in the next couple of months for our reporters here this is to help them to get to understand and have experts in there doctors and especially nurses and also people who are able to assist the council and give us enough time on the weekend just to ensure that we are able to help our reporters at this time because I guess the older reporters in the newsroom are also busy with other rounds they're not able to help many of the reporters that are new and young and trying to do health rounds and do the COVID round so I thought that that would be also good to point out that yes our newsrooms definitely need a lot of help at this time in order to counter a lot of misinformation that is not even filtered due to newsrooms not being able to have that capacity to do so. Joyce it's probably something it's going to keep you busy something you are doing. And it is yes. Yeah I think for a lot of the newsrooms there must be an appreciation of sort of the numbers that are out there and the things that they do and the ability to go out and get a story every day and file for hourly bulletins or your main bulletin and there is a need for sort of content research support in newsrooms so you have your people go out and you collect stories and events and stats and you come in but there's sort of depth to the information that you need really quickly and you need someone who can get that for you really quickly and so that is an element of support that certainly we we've been doing sort of here with media organizations our partners the national broadcasters and that but they're finding it really useful to have content guides that just give information from policy to stats to sources for references and for them to quickly just access it and go okay that's going to help build a story on this that is using sort of credible information straight at their fingertips because time every day they're meeting deadlines and again some of the challenges of doing that kind of business in this country um some good questions here sort of a combo i'm going to bring in two parts from sewer her and test newton k and it's it's asking about um as the panel have you seen any evidence of facebook's campaign against misinformation in png um and do you have any um signs or examples where facebook has stepped in to moderate or remove posts that are perpetuating misinformation gary maybe i'll come to you on this i mean through the ncc have you had any outreach from some of these social platforms and ways that they can help you around these information challenges yeah no so um facebook um as an organization has reached out to park an uni and uh made it clear that they will be addressing the misinformation in the country and i think that from the national level has has gone up to them to request that as a skill that they have started uh um in park an uni started uh blocking off misinformation sites and and also uh i've noticed that as soon as you flag the misinformation and it's it's taken off offline immediately which is good so we are getting that assistance from them uh from the platform yes that's good to know gary um follow-up question for prashanthan for joys on their information from earlier and it's a question from sharon pingy and she asks if you've been able to do any analysis of some of the commenters to get a sense are they real users do they have older accounts are they more you know burner account type setups are they real names do they have any specialization are you seeing that have you been able to dive into that uh to get any sense of that in terms of the facebook um analysis we didn't do it at that level of granularity so we could tell if accounts were similar but we couldn't determine if they were actually bought accounts um i think from an analytical point of view that's easier to do with twitter because apropos software out there you could actually determine um if an account exhibits uh patterns of that of being a bought or not an account but it's slightly when it comes to facebook from my understanding so for the analysis that we have done so far we've just focused on the patterns of the patterns of accounts that are similar in terms of responding or commenting on misinformation but we haven't yet developed um sort of a look at whether these were bought just primarily because of the complexity involved at the moment just to delve into the information all right now i realized we're very close to two o'clock so i've possibly got time for just one more question um and that is uh hmm who should i send this one to uh perhaps to joys or pristanth um to ask you if the the most virulent i can't believe i actually said that correctly misinformation that's such a hard word tends to use images as well as text or is it just text so what really catches people's attention do you get a sense of that i think uh the images um i'm sorry the text that come with images and naturally catch people's attention and um they'll probably watch a little bit of it or three four five minutes into a video or something um if uh if people are posting stuff that's text based on me the you know there's sort of less i'll take on uh people i guess engaging with it um but where you have i mean generally this is generally speaking and not just sort of one covid and uh information on that yeah um but i've not seen a lot of that yeah sorry you go on you go yeah now i've not that's not seen a lot of that on facebook compared to what's circulating on whatsapp right because we're getting a lot of video audio video materials audio materials um images flowing through whatsapp compared to facebook and so that might be another platform that needs sort of attention from the administrators and harder to dive into i did see one very last question i'm going to throw in from arabella coliwan which just asks and gary i might bounce this one back your way do you feel like enough health experts and professionals have been out been public and talking about these issues and if not would you like to encourage more to do so yeah um uh easy answer is no not enough there's gotta be a lot more health professionals out there talking um and like belinda said um we have to reach out we have to feed the beast the media is a big beast the needs it's hungry um we've gotta feed what what it needs it's not if not it's just going to go around looking for me information um and and then start putting that information that we don't want out there um so we've got to provide the factual information the correct information and a lot more health professionals have got to come out and start talking and then start helping the response i get get the wheels rolling so i arabella is one of our young emergency physicians um and i thank you for the question it's it's really true um we all need to be doing our part and i encourage all any physician anybody listing out there as a health professional you gotta start um advocating for the right things to be done now gary thank you very much and thanks to you and the rest of our panel belinda joys and prashan thanks so much for being part of this conversation today thanks to you watching remotely i hope you've enjoyed the conversation it's just the tip of the iceberg there's so much to be discussed in this area we'll be sharing a link to today's discussion shortly on email and as soon as it's available you'll get that message thanks to my production team who helped this all help make this all happen today and to our event sponsors uh we appreciate you tuning in today and look forward to our next event from the os png network at the low institute bye for now