I was trawling through the AFP’s Fact Checking service and found this recent bit of misinformation about Dasani water. The claim is a form of guilt by association. Dasani, manufactured by Coca-Cola, has several salts added for flavor, one of which is potassium chloride (chemically refered to as KCI). KCI is used in a broad range of things. Unfortunately for Coca-Cola, one of those is lethal injection.
The instagram feed where this was posted is mostly made up of Latinx commentary and social news - up and coming musicians, cultural commentary, and viral videos. As far as I can tell, this is the only piece of obvious misinformation and the only post I saw that was explicitly trying to mobilize their followers to do anything.
So, how did such a piece of misinformation get into the feed? It’s unclear. My guess is they get stories from many different people and this one slipped through the editorial gates. But, it did get me to start looking online for the origin of thie particular piece of misinformation.
Google’s information correction in a misinformation article
The featured result when searching for Dasani and Potassium Chloride is another, more recently dated “news” “article” from the Seoul Times on the link shared by Dasani drinkers and death row inmates.
The feature pulls out the piece of true information, that the amount of KCI in Dasani is incomporable to that used in lethal injection. But, if you click into the actual article, you find a different set of arguments including this bit of manufactured disinformation.
Again, the question arises, how does this stuff get into an otherwise seeminlgly legitimate news website? The author attributed to the article is Stephen Fox who, according to his bio, is an editor at the Santa Fe Sun News. While there is no record of the Santa Fe Sun News (even in the Wikipedia list of newspapers in New Mexico), he is findable through his art gallery where he appears to spend his days now. He’s one contributor among many. The Seoul Times appears to have some legitimate journalists in its networks and some genuine news. However, it isn’t difficult to find anonymously written misinformation masquerading as news.
Again, just as the instagram post from @TheFooCommunity, we see disinformaiton getting into the ecosystem through poor editing of shared media platforms. This combination of mosty valid information with misinformation sprinkled in is what makes misinformation hard to spot for the casual reader and easy to spread online.
The Eternal Return
This is not the first instance of ingredient-based disinformation lodged againstDasani or Coca-Cola. Last year, a YouTuber posted a video claiming Dasani made a suspicious fizz sound and that the salts are added to make you more thirsty. In a recent article, Shin et al suggest that, unlike true information, misinformation continues to circulate, often coming back into the spotlight. We see that this year in the incessant return of claims about 5G, tracking devices, and more recently magnetism in vaccines. There is an underlying opportunity structure for people to make disinforming claims about the ingredients of everyday goods and these claims, spreading wide and their corrections trailing behind, can circulate in the population until another disinformer with access to a platform brings it up anew.