New Technologies in International Law / Tymofeyeva, Crhák et al.

and expert opinions. By adopting a multi-faceted methodology, this article provides a holistic examination of the infodemia issue, offering insights and recommendations based on both scholarly research and real-world experiences. 1. Infodemia: The Proliferation of Falsehoods At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2020, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, sounded an early warning: “we’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous”. The WHO defines an infodemic as “too much information including false or mislea ding information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak. It cau ses confusion and risk-taking behaviours that can harm health. It also leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines the public health response”. 718 The rise of social media and the internet has exacerbated the infodemic, intertwining misinformation with the pandemic’s dynamics. To counteract this, the WHO advocates for infodemic management based on risk- and evidence-based analysis, offering credible health infor mation, and building resilience against misinformation or disinformation. 719 To address the infodemic, the WHO and experts advocate for information hygiene to promote responsible individual behavior. Information hygiene, meaning elimination of misinformation and disinformation from circulation, is considered crucial to prevent the spread of infodemia. Building individual resilience against infodemic is promoted as a way to build societal resilience against disinformation and the pandemic itself. 720 Various initiatives to counter COVID-19 misinformation have emerged, with a fo cus on increasing trust in scientific evidence, promoting vaccine positivity, and fact- -checking to debunk myths. 721 These initiatives involve governments, civil society, and international organizations, emphasizing information hygiene, media literacy, and fact- -checking. Some of them engage artificial intelligence-based technologies pointed at detecting and eliminating false information from online circulation. 722 2. Infodemia’s Assault on Human Rights Infodemia endangers a number of human rights. As misinformation and disinfor mation frequently aims to damage the victims’ reputation 723 potential violations of the 718 World Health Organization, ‘Infodemic’, (2022) accessed 10 October 2023. 719 Ibid. 720 See, World Health Organization, ‘WHO policy brief: COVID-19 infodemic management’, (2022), accessed 10 October 2023. 721 Cuan-Baltazar JY, Muñoz-Perez MJ, Robledo-Vega C, Pérez-Zepeda MF, and Soto-Vega E, ‘Misinformation of COVID-19 on the Internet: Infodemiology Study’ (2020) 6(2) JMIR Public Health Surveill 8444. 722 Cueva E, Ee G, Iyer A, Pereira A, Roseman A and Martinez D, ‘Detecting Fake News on Twitter Using Machine Learning Models’, Paper presented at the (2020) IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC), Cambridge, MA, USA, pp. 1-5. 723 Hameleers M, van den Meer T and Vliegenhart R, ‘Civilized Truths, Hateful Lies? Incivility and Hate

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