COV-19: The Battle to Spotlight Credible Information

7 min readDec 19, 2020

Bringing the most reliable information to the public is critical during a crisis. But most governments are clueless on how to do it. Walking on eggshells, Google is discreetly helping them.

As I’m wrapping up this Monday Note, I am looking at the French official government channel on YouTube. The press briefing held just 24 hours earlier by Pr. Jerome Salomon, head of the French public health system, has collected 164 views. That’s not a typo: one hundred sixty-four. Not exactly stellar performance. By comparison, the video about the Covid-19 by a young French YouTuber named Hugo Travers made 380,000 views; his channel, “Hugo Decrypte” has nearly 600,000 subscribers, and he counts 370,000 followers on Instagram.

As always, Mr. Salomon is seated behind his desk, reciting a series of statistics on the evolution of the outbreak in France. No charts, no slides, nothing but a public official talking in a monotone voice. Making it duller would be nearly impossible without scrupulous media training.

When it comes to its communication, the French Government Information Service (SIG) seems stuck in the Sixties. No wonder why the “Gouvernement” channel has a meager 8900 subscribers.

Such anemic viewership is a matter of concern in a time of national emergency.

Mr. Salomon’s briefing is one of the few reliable sources of information available on the outbreak. It aggregates data from regional and local health agencies that monitor the status of 67 million French citizens. As such, it is an essential reference.

Information about a global pandemic should have a few goals: it should be accurate and trusted, precise enough to give a clear picture of what’s going on, presented in a way that will not fuel panic, and actionable by the citizens. Last but not least, official information should be designed to counter the spread of misinformation.

That’s why the French government called in Google for help. Discreetly, in accordance with its internal procedures for such extreme situations, the search engine tweaked its main algorithm by pushing up the weight for the “authoritativeness” of a source — one of the many signals compiled by Google. Such a change is the prerogative of the group of engineers in charge of the integrity of the main search engine and is performed in Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

In France, the result was immediately visible as shown on this screenshot taken Saturday:

Google is also making available to the French government a special version of “Google Trends.” Its powerful analytic tool takes the pulse of the country in real-time, by breaking down the queries at the regional and local level. On a daily basis, the cabinet member in charge of digital policy is given a briefing that is later used by public health officials.

But this doesn’t solve the main shortcoming of government communication — not only in France but nearly everywhere. Today, garnering a large audience means mastering video and mobile distribution. In France, YouTube has more than 42 million regular viewers. Again, Google is suggesting strategies to increase the audience for health officials and research agencies involved in containing the outbreak. As weird as it sounds, however, there is no public information aimed at regional audiences. It’s a major drawback as the COVID-19 is spread in uneven “clusters” that call for specific measures.

As for the public television system and its multiple channels, it is reluctant to put clips on YouTube with short segments aimed at specific clusters of the epidemic. It is not in their culture. Instead, public television officials are lobbying the government to tailor the timing and the content of the daily briefing to fit the format and the schedule of the sacrosanct evening newscast, even if its audience equals a tiny fraction of the daily users of social networks.

In France, Google is walking on eggshells.

Tech giants are notoriously unpopular among the French media and government elite. Under direct pressure from Emmanuel Macron, Google has been ordered to find a deal to pay publishers for results displayed on the search page. The French authority in charge of fair competition is supposed to negotiate a deal within 90 days. Given the current circumstances, Google is tempted to bow in order to solve the issue quickly. French publishers want €200~250m yearly in compensation for the results appearing in search pages, but they will likely settle for €50m a year, according to both governmental and industry sources. While the discussion will be hard in its technicalities, everybody has an interest to quickly settle the matter to be free to focus on what’s important. Like in Italy, the COVID-19 is about to become a national health emergency in which providing the best possible information — both by the media and from public services — will be critical for the continuity of public services as well as the entire economy.

This week or the next, France will enter what is called Stage 3 of the epidemic. It will mean harsh containment measures that will severely impact everyday life in large portions of the national territory.

Schools and universities, for instance, will likely close and will have to shift to online teaching. Right now, according to education professionals, the national platform dedicated to online classes works poorly. In Italy, it was not better, but the MUIR (Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca) took a radical step to rely exclusively on off-the-shelf education platforms provided — for free — by Microsoft and Google:

Both offer collaborative tools allowing hundreds of students per class, large audience webcasts, as well as all sorts of modules to track the work of a class, send all sorts of material, get feedback, etc.

It will be interesting to see how the strong anti-US Big Tech feeling in France, especially among education officials, will play out. One sure thing though, the French e-education platform, essentially powered by the “invented here” principle, won’t do the job.

— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

J-Schools: Correction on ASU Tuition costs

In the Monday Note #577 devoted to the costs of J-schools in the United States, I quoted data from CUNY that contained an error regarding the tuition fees for Arizona State University. According to an ASU official: “The costs are for a three-semester program (Fall/Spring/Fall) taking at least 12 credit hours per semester. The tuition-only cost, as requested, is a total of $17,580 for Arizona residents and $47,100 for non-residents. These costs are based on academic year 2019–2020 rates.”

Below is the corrected table that compares the tuition costs for 16 Americain J-Schools.

COV-19: The Battle to Spotlight Credible Information

Bringing the most reliable information to the public is critical during a crisis. But most governments are clueless on how to do it. Walking on eggshells, Google is discreetly helping them.

Such anemic viewership is a matter of concern in a time of national emergency.

J-Schools: Correction on ASU Tuition costs

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