![]() ![]() It does take a lot of collective time, and we try to make sure that if someone’s having a busy day or week, then we try to help them out. But just general day-to-day management, it’s a pretty large team and we try to coordinate with each other. For example, if there’s big news about a vaccine being approved, then we’ll all just be spending a significant portion of the day answering user questions and combating misinformation. Rohan: There’s an ebb and flow to how much time it takes to moderate. But before, every day, I was opening up the sub, and every morning I would read the front page of our subreddit, and it was all just bad news. Now there’s good news about vaccines ( SN: 3/30/21 SN: 3/8/21). SN: What is it like moderating every day? How often do you take breaks?ĭoherty: It can be kind of soul crushing sometimes, especially when there wasn’t a lot of good news. The scale has been different, but the kind of conspiracy theories you see and the kind of things people say are no different. There’s been nothing different in this pandemic to what there was in Ebola, there’s just been more of it. Because I’ve done this before with Ebola. ![]() ![]() SN: Has there been anything that’s surprised you about moderating r/Coronavirus?Ĭole: Honestly, largely no. And I thought given my background, I would be able to give some help with that. I wanted to contribute to removing some of that stuff, and I also thought there was a lot of opportunity for the subreddit to run special projects, like motivate people to get vaccines or help them find vaccination locations. Over the course of the previous six months of the pandemic, I had seen a lot of misinformation on the subreddit. Rohan: I started in September 2020, the day before Trump tested positive ( SN: 10/5/20). The moderators saw my comment and liked how I expressed the science, so they invited me to a be a moderator. The paper eventually ended up getting retracted ( SN: 3/26/20). So I had written a detailed comment in response, explaining why the paper was bad and why the results didn’t mean anything. And one that came out was about how … the coronavirus could have potentially been manufactured in a lab using an HIV strain. At the start of the pandemic, there was a lot of really bad preprint papers that were coming out. SN: How did you become a moderator?ĭoherty: I actually was recruited by one of the other moderators. student in molecular biology.Īnswers have been edited for clarity and length. Head moderator Patrick Doherty is a biotech research scientist Jennifer Cole is a biological anthropologist at Royal Holloway University of London, who studies online communities related to health and became an infodemic manager, after receiving training from a World Health Organization initiative to fight misinformation and Rohan - who requested not to use his full name due to the daily harassment he receives on Reddit - is a M.D./Ph.D. Science News spoke to three of these moderators about what it’s like to combat misinformation online during a pandemic. Sign up for e-mail updates on the latest coronavirus news and research They work tirelessly to make sure the information on the subreddit is reliable, taking time away from their jobs as doctors, researchers and students. Even Reddit CEO Steve Huffman reached out to the volunteers who moderate the forum to tell them that he starts his day by reading it and to thank them for their work.īut the work these moderators do isn’t easy, as the forum is also a breeding ground for misinformation. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as top researchers. The community has also hosted Q&A discussions with the likes of Bill Gates and Tom Frieden, former director of the U.S. The forum has become a one-stop shop for up-to-date coronavirus information, offering up pandemic news, locations of vaccination sites and how to sign up for clinical trials. Today, the page has 2.4 million users, with around 10,000 new comments a day. That number spiked to 1.5 million by March of 2020, partly due to Reddit highlighting it on their homepage over any of the other related subreddits. In January 2020, it had around 1,000 members. One such place is the r/Coronavirus community on the website Reddit. Combating misinformation online is an ongoing challenge for big tech, and it’s especially difficult when it’s on a discussion board with millions of people during a pandemic. ![]()
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