Coronavirus Victoria: experts warn against blaming migrant communities for spreading misinformation

As Victoria grapples with multiple clusters of Covid-19 across 10 suburbs, experts have warned against blaming culturally diverse communities for spreading or believing misinformation, following comments by the state’s chief health officer that appeared to hold conspiracy theories partially responsible for the spike.

“There are people who use social media from their country of origin or amongst their network of friends as their primary source of information,” Prof Brett Sutton said on Wednesday. “A lot of it tells them that it’s all rubbish messaging from the government.”

The director of Monash University’s migration and inclusion centre, Associate Professor Rebecca Wickes, said the government risked exposing migrant communities to unfair criticism by failing to provide more details after Sutton’s comments.

Related: Reports Melbourne coronavirus cluster originated at Eid party could stoke Islamophobia, Muslim leaders say

“Too many people think Covid-19 is a hoax, that’s not a belief confined to migrant communities,” Wickes said.

“It would be good to have further clarification from the government about whether they believe it’s a problem of language and misunderstanding, or whether they really do think conspiracy theories have played a part in this cluster and if so, how. This information is not coming through.

“We can’t just push blame onto certain groups of people.”

‘You can’t just push information out’

Health authorities have made clear that much of the recent spread has been due to family gatherings. While some of these families are from communitieswhere different generations often live under the same roof, it is unclear what has led the government to believe it was belief in conspiracies that caused the spread, as opposed to failure to socially distance when sick, or a lack of understanding about health advice due to language barriers.

The clusters are not just confined to or driven by multicultural communities, with multiple outbreaks of concern throughout the state including some linked to childcare centres and workplaces. When Guardian Australia asked Victoria’s department of health to clarify what conspiracy theories specifically it believed was proliferating in multicultural communities and how these contributed to the recent increase in cases, the department did not answer. However, it reiterated that any suggestion that the dangers of Covid-19 were being overplayed by health experts was dangerous.

“Any suggestion otherwise is an insult to the remarkable Victorians working around the clock to control the spread of the virus and care for those infected,” he said.

“The spreading of misinformation is particularly dangerous at a time when we are trying to slow the spread of a spike in coronavirus cases and particularly focusing on engaging culturally and linguistically diverse communities, who may be less connected to mainstream media.”

A department spokesman said: “Coronavirus is an incredibly infectious disease that has killed hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, including 20 Victorians.” He said the department is providing information in 53 languages alongside a dedicated hotline for any queries on virus symptoms and testing.

Wickes said she was concerned by videos being shared by some media reporting on the Victorian situation that appeared to show two European men hugging and giving each other kisses on the cheek.

“Last weekend, I grabbed my daughter and hugged her very tightly, and we both have been socially distancing appropriately and taking precautions throughout this epidemic, and maybe these men were doing the same,” she said.

She said the government was slow to share public health information with culturally and linguistically diverse communities at the outset of the epidemic, which eventually became a pandemic. She wondered whether the government was trying to find a source of blame for the spread in some of those communities, when government messaging could have been better tailored from the start and helped to prevent clusters.

On Thursday, Muslim community leaders said they were terrified that unconfirmed news reports claiming one of Melbourne’s coronavirus clusters originated at a family Eid celebration could create a new wave of anti-Islamic sentiment.

Related: What caused Victoria's Covid-19 spike and can it be contained?

“When government leaders start scrambling for answers and are not being clear about how they’ve come to those answers it creates uncertainty and that’s when people behave in ways not aligned with best practice,” she said.

“The government has been very slow on the uptake in the space of communicating public health messaging effectively with migrant communities. You can’t just push information out in different languages. We need better research into what messaging works specifically, and how best to target these communities on different platforms and in different environments.”

A survey of 1,420 Australians at the peak of the outbreak between 18 and 24 March, led by University of New South Wales, found Australians showed a high level of compliance to public health advice during the crisis, despite only one in five perceiving Covid-19 as a high risk to their health. Published on Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, it found more than 90% of respondents said they’d actively changed their behaviour to help stop the spread of the virus to others.

‘Pre-bunk’ misinformation

Prof Mark Andrejevic, an expert in misinformation and social media, said more research was needed into those who did not change their behaviour, with belief in conspiracy theories or distrust in government not necessarily the dominant reason. But the concern is that even one person not adhering to guidelines could trigger a super-spread event, he said. He said governments needed to “pre-bunk” misinformation rather than just tackle misinformation campaigns as they occurred.

“Governments need to say immediately from the outset that just as the virus is circulating, so will misinformation, and try to improve people’s health literacy and ability to identify these harmful campaigns before they occur,” he said.

“The contemporary media environment is so saturated, with so many stories changing so fast that it’s too hard and almost impossible to only debunk misinformation as it occurs.”

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A professor of public health with the University of Sydney, Julie Leask, said it was always important for the government to be collecting data “to back up these behavioural hunches, particularly when it involves inferences about a particular population group where stigmatisation or stereotyping could follow”.

“Hopefully that is occurring,” she said.

Leask added that many factors influence human behaviour. Misinformation and conspiratorial thinking is one facet of why people don’t comply. She said while research had found that people who speak a language other than English are more likely to believe Covid-19 misinformation, this was different to believing in and perpetuating conspiracies which are organised, sinister and arranged by certain actors to harm society. But a host of more ordinary barriers are also at play in spread, she said, with Covid-19 forcing people to adopt and sustain a range of new behaviours.

“They require hundreds of micro-decisions and actions in everyday life – how close we are when talking with somebody, how often we wash our hands,” she said. These new habits can be hard to sustain over the long haul, she said. Once the threat appraisal reduces, it’s easier to revert to old behaviours.

“Misinformation might be having a role to play but alone it doesn’t shape people’s actions. There will also be a desire to reconnect with family, a tendency to forget the new prevention behaviours, not wanting to miss work and get tested, and not seeing covid as being that serious and not realising that one’s own actions affect others.”