This is Ted Health, I'm Dr. Shoshana Unger-Lighter.

Today, we're listening to a talk by data scientists Sinon are all about how misinformation

works and what we can do to combat it.

Sinon focuses a lot on political misinformation, but health misinformation is also rampant,

especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After the talk, stick around to hear my interview with Andy Slavitt.

He's the former White House senior advisor for the COVID-19 response under the Biden administration,

and I spoke to him about how to spot public health misinformation,

where messaging falls short and where to go from here.

So, on April 23rd of 2013,

the Associated Press put out the following tweet on Twitter.

It said, breaking news, two explosions at the White House, and Barack Obama has been injured.

This tweet was retweeted 4,000 times in less than five minutes, and it went viral thereafter.

Now, this tweet wasn't real news put out by the Associated Press.

In fact, it was false news or fake news that was propagated by Syrian hackers that had infiltrated the Associated Press Twitter handle.

Their purpose was to disrupt society, but they disrupted much more,

because automated trading algorithms immediately seized on the sentiment on this tweet

and began trading based on the potential that the President of the United States had been injured or killed in this explosion.

And as they started tweeting, they immediately sent the stock market crashing,

wiping out $140 billion in equity value in a single day.

Robert Mueller, special counsel prosecutor in the United States, issued indictments against three Russian companies

and 13 Russian individuals on a conspiracy to defraud the United States by meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

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