Should Digital Contact Tracing Technologies be used to Control COVID-19? Perspectives from an Australian Public Deliberation

In this essay I address the difficult question of how citizens with conflicting religious and secular views can fulfill the democratic obligation of justifying the imposition of coercive policies to others with reasons that they can also accept. After discussing the difficulties of proposals that either exclude religious beliefs from public deliberation or include them without any restrictions, I argue instead for a policy of mutual accountability that imposes the same deliberative rights and obligations on all democratic citizens. The main advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply.

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Real-time visualization of contact tracing information to aid timely decision making in outbreak control

10.26226/morressier.57fe118dd462b8028d8908a1 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Loes Soetens

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Real Time ◽

Contact Tracing ◽

Outbreak Control ◽

Real Time Visualization

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Can fake news really change behaviour? Evidence from a study of COVID-19 misinformation.

10.31234/osf.io/qfnm3 ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ciara Greene ◽

Gillian Murphy

Keyword(s):

Empirical Research ◽

Health Behaviour ◽

Real World ◽

Empirical Data ◽

Contact Tracing ◽

Fake News ◽

Behavioural Intentions ◽

The Real ◽

News Stories

Previous research has argued that fake news may have grave consequences for health behaviour, but surprisingly, no empirical data have been provided to support this assumption. This issue takes on new urgency in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. In this large preregistered study (N = 3746) we investigated the effect of exposure to fabricated news stories about COVID-19 on related behavioural intentions. We observed small but measurable effects on some related behavioural intentions but not others – for example, participants who read a story about problems with a forthcoming contact-tracing app reported reduced willingness to download the app. We found no effects of providing a general warning about the dangers of online misinformation on response to the fake stories, regardless of the framing of the warning in positive or negative terms. We conclude with a call for more empirical research on the real-world consequences of fake news.

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