Alongside the pandemic, governments and communities faced infodemic: misinformation and disinformation that spread virally through social media, causing people to ignore public-health protocols and even doubt that COVID-19 was real. While states like Singapore actively combatted misinformation, other states like the United States actively disseminated disinformation, prompting us to reconsider how we define authoritarian and democratic governments during so-called states of exception.
Going Viral allows us to model our own behavior by intervening in the viral spread of misinformation. It generates what might be called pirated public service announcement by silencing the misinformation propagated by celebrities, politicians, pundits, and social media influencers, replacing their voices with ones of public-health authorities and scientists that conveys correct information.
Going Viral uses a “conditional generative adversarial network that is trained on sets of two images where one image becomes a map to produce a second image.” Below the corrected video, the speaker’s original misinformation is explained.
Going Viral was been supported by NEoN Digital Arts Festival.