Coronavirus: When fiction gets in way of facts, all we get is mass hysteria

South Australian Premier Steven Marshall. Picture: AAP

If truth is the first casualty of war, in the war against the coronavirus, one of the biggest battles is against the slapdash propensity for social media to publish any old piece of unchecked or fabricated fancy — lest fiction get in the way and ­anxious people get suckered into believing it.

The text messages started flying around Adelaide at 3pm on Tuesday, spreading faster than COVID-19 itself. “Premier in meeting right now. Sporting bodies attending. Lockdown could be imposed. State borders closing.”

The entire state of SA was set to cut itself off from the rest of the ­nation to avoid the larger coronavirus outbreaks to the east.

Even the Premier wasn’t immune — the posts had begun ­appearing in Steven Marshall’s own social media feed, and he also received calls from his daughter, Georgie, asking if the rumours of the state’s closure were true.

An hour or so later, posts started popping up on Facebook and WhatsApp purporting to reveal the secret plan Scott Morrison was set to announce — a two-week national closure starting on Wednesday when schools and universities would shut down and everyone would be ordered indoors.

It all sounded plausible if not convincing, especially with the ­accompanying preamble that the message had come “from a cop mate”, “someone in government”, “a reliable source”. There was just one problem — it was all rubbish.

On Wednesday, the job fell to an exasperated Premier to start his day ringing Adelaide radio stations begging them not to run a word of it.

When the Premier called, he was at his wit’s end trying to keep the public calm amid panic-buying and stockpiling. Mainstream news organisations in Adelaide were chasing the rumours, which were further fuelled by uninformed supposition over the fact that the Premier had not held an afternoon press conference on Tuesday, as he had been doing.

So on Wednesday, with people adding two and two and getting five, the first thing he did was ring key news stations imploring presenters not to reproduce or even allude to any of the theories as fact.

Rather, he urged the radio stations to help combat the spread of misinformation by acknowledging their existence and rejecting them as baseless.

“The stuff that is doing the rounds is literally preposterous,” Mr Marshall told FiveAA.

“We are just panicking our own people. I’ve had calls from Georgie saying ‘Dad, is all this true?’.”

“I’ve seen messages myself saying we are about to go into lockdown. It’s ridiculous and we have to ignore it because it’s only going to result in anxiety and panic.

“We have got to take this seriously but we are so much better protected than anyone else, that’s the message we need to get out to South Australians.”

He rang our station, FiveAA, at 5.50am, just before the breakfast show started at 6am, explaining he couldn’t go on air since he could not answer questions about Tuesday’s national cabinet meeting and wanted to give the Prime Minister clear air ahead of his 9am press conference outlining the next stages in the COVID-19 ­response.

Mr Marshall repeated his message at his Wednesday press conference in Ade­laide after the PM had spoken earlier.

“There is no state lockdown,” he said. “There is no CBD lockdown. This is wrong. It’s unhelpful. It’s completely and utterly ludicrous. There is not a chance we are locking down the CBD.”

Our leaders have better things to do than start their day with a one-man mopping up exercise for the all-care, no responsibility news ethics of the social media giants.

Clear and candid daily information from the powers that be is the best way to immunise ourselves — not from the virus, but a nasty case of terminal BS syndrome. It’s a reminder for discernment among consumers of news, and for the sake of our sanity.