When the Infodemic Spread Faster Than the Virus
On March 8, 2020, Bangladesh confirmed its first three COVID-19 cases. Within days, a parallel epidemic had already begun — one measured not in infections but in shares, forwards, and viral posts. Claims that coronavirus did not exist circulated widely, buying time for denial to take root before a single vaccine was available. Homegrown remedies spread through Facebook and WhatsApp: stop eating protein to prevent infection; drink hot tea four times a day and gargle hot water; boiling water consumption would protect against the virus. None had any scientific basis. Some were actively harmful. And in Bangladesh, where traditional health beliefs carry significant social authority and where digital health literacy was uneven across a 170-million-person population, these claims found fertile ground.
The World Health Organisation gave this phenomenon a name: "infodemic" — an epidemic of information, much of it false, that complicated the public health response to COVID-19 worldwide. In Bangladesh, the infodemic had consequences that extended beyond individual health decisions. A single piece of COVID-19 misinformation globally claimed at least 800 lives. In Bangladesh, COVID denial and vaccine misinformation led to vaccine hesitancy that threatened the country's public health response. Rumours spread that dead bodies were being dumped in rivers and seas, that real data was being hidden by the government and manipulated figures shared in its place. Statements from the Prime Minister were misrepresented on news portals. Fake photos with no relation to the pandemic were used to construct inflammatory stories. In Joypurhat, a garment worker took their own life after receiving false information about COVID. In Naogaon, a man was convinced mid-journey that his mother had contracted the virus — a claim that proved false when she tested negative.
These were not isolated incidents. They were symptoms of a structural vulnerability in Bangladesh's information ecosystem that the pandemic exposed with unusual clarity — and that subsequent years have confirmed remains deeply present.
The COVID Misinformation Landscape in Bangladesh
Research published in peer-reviewed journals documented the specific contours of COVID misinformation in Bangladesh. The country's approximately 100 million internet users — a rapidly expanding base given widespread smartphone adoption — made social media the primary vector for false health information. Facebook, in particular, functioned as the dominant information environment for many Bangladeshis, a platform where algorithmic amplification and low-friction sharing combined to give misinformation structural advantages over slower-moving factual corrections.
The misinformation fell into recognisable categories. Denial — claims that COVID-19 did not exist or was no more serious than influenza — preceded vaccination and served as a barrier to taking protective measures. Therapeutic misinformation — false claims about cures and preventive measures — diverted people from evidence-based health behaviours toward ineffective or harmful alternatives. Kalazira (fennel flower), a traditional remedy with genuine cultural authority in Bangladesh, was promoted as a COVID cure despite no clinical evidence supporting this use. Vaccine misinformation — false claims about side effects, conspiracy theories about the intentions behind vaccination programmes, denial of vaccine efficacy — amplified hesitancy during the rollout period when establishing public confidence was critical.
The government's own communication contributed to the confusion. Referring to the initial nationwide lockdown as "general holidays" — a formulation chosen to avoid alarming the public — instead created misunderstanding about the severity of the situation, with some people treating the period as an opportunity to travel, visit relatives, and attend social gatherings. Clear public health communication is itself a counter-misinformation tool, and the gap between technical public health messaging and accessible public communication was a significant structural weakness.
Vaccine misinformation was particularly consequential. Bangladesh's vaccination drive, launched in 2021, was accompanied by a wave of false claims — about the Serum Institute of India doses, about alleged government prioritisation of vaccines for officials and ruling party members rather than the general public, about side effects that had no clinical basis. BD FactCheck, one of Bangladesh's earliest independent fact-checking initiatives, debunked multiple viral claims in real time, including a forged document claiming that vaccine access would be restricted to government officials — a false claim that directly contradicted publicly announced distribution plans.
Bangladesh's Fact-Checking Ecosystem: What Exists and What It Lacks
The COVID pandemic accelerated the development of Bangladesh's fact-checking infrastructure, which has grown significantly since 2020 even as the challenges it faces have intensified. The ecosystem now includes Rumor Scanner — Bangladesh's leading fact-checking organisation — alongside Dismislab (which combines fact-checking with media research), BD FactCheck, BOOM Bangladesh, Fact Watch, AFP Bangladesh, NewsChecker, and Fact Crescendo. These organisations collectively form the primary institutional layer between misinformation production and public consumption.
Their output is substantial. In 2024, eight fact-checking platforms collectively published 4,699 fact-check reports, documenting over 3,000 unique pieces of false or misleading information. Dismislab's annual review found that misinformation increased 58 percent in 2024 compared to 2023 — a figure that reflects both growing misinformation production and improved detection capacity. Rumor Scanner identified 296 instances of misinformation in April 2025 alone, 298 in March, and 329 in September 2025. Facebook remained the primary vector, accounting for 289 of September 2025's documented cases, followed by Instagram (156) and TikTok (82).
However, the ecosystem faces significant structural constraints. Independent fact-checking organisations in Bangladesh operate with limited institutional support, restricted resources, and no comprehensive legal protection framework. Most major Bangladeshi media outlets do not maintain dedicated internal fact-checking teams — a practice standard in developed country media environments but rare domestically. Rumor Scanner reviewed 681 reports across 164 media outlets in the first half of 2024 and identified 78 false reports — not fringe sources but mainstream outlets, including state broadcaster Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha, which published a false report about onion imports that was later debunked. By the first nine months of 2024, fake photo cards mimicking the visual styles of leading outlets like Prothom Alo, Jamuna TV, and The Daily Star had risen to 324 instances — more than double the 145 recorded in all of 2023. The sophistication of misinformation production is outpacing the current capacity to detect and debunk it.
From Health Misinformation to a Broader Information Crisis
The COVID misinformation crisis did not end with the pandemic. It established patterns, platforms, and practitioner networks that have since been applied across a much broader range of topics — political, communal, and security-related. What Bangladesh's experience illustrates is that health misinformation during the pandemic was not a discrete episode but a preview of the information environment that has since become normal.
The scale documented in 2024-25 data is striking. In September 2025, Dismislab and Rumor Scanner confirmed that a real death toll of four victims in Khagrachhari-Rangamati clashes was inflated on social media to 32, 67, and in some cases over 100 — a direct parallel to the COVID-era pattern of false casualty figures and manipulated data. Communal misinformation — false claims about religious minorities, inflammatory videos misidentified as recent, fabricated quotes attributed to officials — Rumor Scanner identified 142 such instances in just the first eight months of 2025. AI-generated content and deepfakes, which barely existed as a misinformation vector during COVID, now feature regularly: 18 cases involving AI and 13 deepfakes in September 2025 alone.
For health misinformation specifically, the post-COVID landscape includes persistent false claims about vaccines that continue to circulate despite the pandemic's acute phase having passed, misinformation about food safety and pharmaceutical products, and the generalised erosion of institutional trust in health authorities that sustained misinformation exposure tends to produce. The WHO's term "infodemic" was coined for COVID, but the underlying dynamic — false health claims spreading faster than accurate information in an environment of uncertainty and limited institutional communication capacity — applies equally to future health emergencies, and Bangladesh's preparedness for the next one depends significantly on whether the lessons of COVID have been institutionalised.
What Future Preparedness Requires
Bangladesh's experience with COVID misinformation has produced both evidence of the problem's severity and a partial blueprint for the institutional responses needed. Experts, fact-checking organisations, and academic researchers who have studied Bangladesh's information ecosystem consistently identify the same set of requirements.
Mainstream media accountability is the most immediate need. The country's leading media outlets — those with the resources and reach to have the most impact — need dedicated internal fact-checking units that verify content before publication rather than relying on external organisations to debunk after the fact. The current model, in which independent organisations like Rumor Scanner and Dismislab operate as external monitors of media that often publish without systematic verification, is structurally reactive. Prevention requires that the verification function be embedded at the source.
Digital and media literacy education needs to reach the scale of Bangladesh's digital expansion. By early 2024, Bangladesh had approximately 53 million active social media users — approximately 30 percent of the population, and growing rapidly. New entrants to digital information environments who lack experience distinguishing credible from false sources are disproportionately vulnerable to misinformation. School curricula, community media literacy programmes, and social media platform-level interventions all have roles to play. The UNESCO-supported Bangladesh cultural heritage project's use of social media campaigns to engage youth is a model that could be adapted for health communication and misinformation resilience.
Government health communication needs structural improvement. COVID revealed that technical public health messaging does not automatically translate into accessible public communication. Clear, consistent, culturally appropriate communication from health authorities — before and during health emergencies, not only after misinformation has already spread — is itself the most powerful counter-misinformation tool available to the state. The Bangladesh government's daily COVID updates via television were an appropriate mechanism; the language and framing in which they were delivered was frequently less so.
Social media platform accountability — currently one of the weakest links in the chain — requires both regulatory pressure and direct engagement. Facebook's dominance of Bangladesh's information environment (289 of 329 documented September 2025 misinformation cases originated there) creates a structural dependence on a platform that operates primarily under US and EU regulatory frameworks with limited specific accountability for Bangladeshi content. Meaningful improvement requires localised Bangla-language moderation capacity, rapid response systems for high-velocity false health claims, and engagement with the Bangladeshi fact-checking ecosystem as partners rather than afterthoughts.
The COVID infodemic in Bangladesh was not simply a crisis of bad information. It was a crisis of institutional capacity — the capacity to produce and distribute accurate health information rapidly enough, at sufficient scale, with sufficient credibility, to compete with the misinformation that spreads at the speed of a forward button. Building that capacity before the next health emergency, rather than improvising in its midst, is the most important lesson Bangladesh can draw from its COVID experience.
win-tk.org is a wintk publication covering global and regional affairs with a focus on Bangladesh and South Asia.
