Study sheds light on pre-Columbian life in understudied area of SW Amazon

Evidence showing intensive land use for farming and fishing more than 3,500 years ago helps researchers better understand the history of a culturally significant area and is counter to the often-held notion of a pristine Amazon before Europeans arrived

UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA

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IMAGE: AS PART OF THIS STUDY, THE RESEARCHERS COMMISSIONED AN ILLUSTRATION BY ARTIST KATHRYN KILLACKEY. THE ILLUSTRATION IS A REPRESENTATION OF THE PRE-COLUMBIAN LANDSCAPE AROUND 3,500 YEARS AGO, BASED ON THEIR... view more 

CREDIT: KATHRYN KILLACKEY

ORLANDO, June 2021 - A new study co-authored by University of Central Florida researchers shows that pre-Columbian people of a culturally diverse but not well-documented area of the Amazon in South America significantly altered their landscape thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show evidence of people using fire and improving their landscape for farming and fishing more than 3,500 years ago. This counters the often-held notion of a pristine Amazon during pre-Columbian times before the arrival of Europeans in the late 1400s.

The study, which was conducted with experts from the UK's Northumbria University, also provides mores clues to the past of the diverse, but not well-documented, cultures that live in the area known as the Llanos de Mojos in northeastern Bolivia.

"This region has one the highest diversity of languages in the world, which reflects distinct ways of life and cultural heritage," says study co-author John Walker, an associate professor in UCF's Department of Anthropology. "We know something about the last 3,000 to 4,000 years of, say Europe or the Mediterranean, but we don't have some of that same information for the people here. That makes this an incredible story waiting to be written."

Part of the way researchers hope to write these stories is to uncover the economic practices of the distant past.

The flat, wetland landscape of the Llanos de Mojos is used for cattle ranching today, but archaeologists have noted for years the evidence from remnants of pre-Columbian raised fields and fish weirs for aquaculture. These remnants indicated the land was once used instead for farming and fishing. The archaeologists just didn't know when or how far back in time these activities started -- until now.

Previous research pointed to a date of about 300 C.E., or about 1,700 years ago. However, the new study combined expertise from multiple disciplines, such as anthropology, paleoethnobotany and paleoecology, to indicate that intensive land management started much earlier, at about 1,500 B.C.E, or about 3,500 years ago.

"This finding is important because it provides evidence that the Amazon is not a pristine wilderness but has been shaped and designed by indigenous people thousands of years before the Spanish arrived," Walker says.

This is new information for both the history of the cultures of the Amazon, which have not been studied as much as other cases, like the Mayas or Incas, and for the area, which is often thought of as an untouched world before the arrival of the Spanish.

Neil Duncan, the study's lead author and a paleoethnobotanist in UCF's Department of Anthropology, specializes in studying archaeological and paleoenvironmental plant remains to learn how humans and plants interacted in the past.

With help from the research team, Duncan extracted two, five-foot long cores of earth from two locations about 13 miles apart in the Llanos de Mojos.

By examining these cores, Duncan found corn and squash phytoliths dating as early as 1380 B.C.E and 650 B.C.E, or about 3,000 years ago. Phytoliths are microscopic silica particles from plant tissue, and the findings suggest these were crops grown in the numerous raised fields that dot the area.

Colleagues from Northumbria University in the United Kingdom examined the cores for charcoal, pollen and diatoms, which are single-celled alga indicative of aquatic environments.

Both cores showed similar trends of initial dry conditions in the oldest layers of earth, followed by increased wet conditions and increased use of wood burning, as evidenced by the presence of high diatom concentrations and charcoal concentrations, respectively. The researchers say wood burning could be for cooking, pottery, warmth and more.

"This is the first time that we've been able to show in the past how people managed their land and water resources in a coupled system," says Bronwen Whitney, an associate professor of geography and environmental sciences who led the research by the Northumbria University team. Whitney is an expert in historic environmental changes, particularly in South and Central America.

"The intensification of plant, fire and water management occurred at the same time, which emphasizes how farming or fishing were equally important to the people of the region," Whitney says.

Also of note is that the shifts in the two cores to more intensive land management happened at different periods, the researchers say.

One core, known as the Mercedes core, showed the shift to wetter conditions and increased fire use starting at 1,500 B.C.E, or about 3,500 years ago. The other, extracted from a location about 13 miles farther south and known as the Quinato-Miraflores core, showed the shift occurring at about 70 B.C.E., or about 2,100 years ago.

Since broadscale climate changes would have affected both areas at the same time, the time difference between the two cores suggests humans were purposefully engineering the land, including draining water in some areas, retaining it in others, and using trees for fuel.

"So, what's happening in the landscape is that that it's becoming wetter, and we think that some of those trees are being flooded out and so they're not as well represented," Duncan says. "And if things are getting wetter then we shouldn't see more charcoal. So, the interpretation is that we would only see these high amounts of charcoal if it's humans doing some very intentional and intensive burning."

The researchers say the next steps are to investigate the function, history, and role of the area's fish weirs and to apply new techniques to date earthworks directly and reconstruct a more detailed agricultural history for the region.

As part of this study, the researchers commissioned an illustration by artist Kathryn Killackey. The illustration is a representation of the pre-Columbian landscape around 3,500 years ago, based on their reconstruction, and details what they believe the region would have looked like at the time.

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The research was funded by a U.S.-U.K. collaborative funding partnership with the National Science Foundation (1758273) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/S00128X/1).

Study co-authors were Nicholas J.D. Loughlin and Emma P. Hocking with the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

The researchers also worked closely with the Bolivia Ministry of Cultures, Unidad Nacional de Arqueologia y Museos, Museo Regional Arqueologico "Yacuma," and researchers and students from the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz.

Duncan received his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Missouri and joined UCF's Department of Anthropology, part of UCF's College of Sciences, in 2015. Walker received his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and joined UCF's Department of Anthropology in 2006.

CONTACT: Robert H. Wells, Office of Research, robert.wells@ucf.edu

 

Indigenous peoples were stewards of the Western Amazon

Study points to a history of indigenous sustainable use of the Western Amazon stretching back 5,000 years

SMITHSONIAN

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IMAGE: AN AERIAL PHOTO OF THE ALGODÓN RIVER FLOWING THROUGH A FOREST OF THE AMAZON BASIN IN THE REMOTE NORTHEASTERN CORNER OF PERU. TO EXPLORE THE EXTENT AND SCALE OF INDIGENOUS... view more 

CREDIT: ÁLVARO DEL CAMPO

Smithsonian scientists and their collaborators have found new evidence that prehistoric Indigenous peoples did not significantly alter large swaths of forest ecosystems in the western Amazon, effectively preserving large areas of rainforests to be unmodified or used in sustainable ways that did not reshape their composition. The new findings are the latest in a long scientific debate about how people in the Amazon have historically shaped the rich biodiversity of the region and global climate systems, presenting new implications for how the Amazon's biodiversity and ecosystems can be best conserved and preserved today.

In recent years, scientists' understanding of the Amazon rainforest has been increasingly informed by a body of research that suggests the landscape was actively, intensively shaped by Indigenous peoples before the arrival of Europeans. Some studies ascribe the tree species that now dominate the forest to prehistoric human management and landscape engineering. Other work posits that when colonizers from Europe caused massive losses to Indigenous Amazonians with disease, slavery and warfare, the sudden interruption in landscape-scale manipulation resulted in so much forest regrowth that it caused a global drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide that brought about a climactic shift that is known as the "Little Ice Age."

Now a new study led by Smithsonian researchers, published June 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that for at least the past 5,000 years, large areas of the rainforest in western Amazonia located away from the fertile soils near rivers were not periodically cleared with fire or subject to intensive land use by the Indigenous population before the arrival of Europeans.

The study, led by Smithsonian senior scientist emerita Dolores Piperno of the National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, is the latest entry in a nearly decade-long scientific debate over prehistoric human influence in the world's largest rainforest.

"Far from implying that complex, permanent human settlements in Amazonia had no influence over the landscape in some regions, our study adds substantially more evidence indicating the bulk of the Indigenous population's serious impact on the forested environment was concentrated in the nutrient-rich soils near rivers, and that their use of the surrounding rainforest was sustainable, causing no detectable species losses or disturbances, over millennia," Piperno said.

To explore the extent and scale of Indigenous modification of the Amazon, Piperno and her co-authors collected and analyzed a series of 10 roughly 3-foot-long soil cores from three sites in the remote northeastern corner of Peru.

The three sites were located at least a half-mile (about 1 kilometer) away from river courses and floodplains, known to researchers as interfluvial zones. Interfluvial forest comprises more than 90% of the Amazon's land area and is therefore crucial to determining the extent of Indigenous influence on the landscape, precisely because most major settlements identified by archaeologists thus far are near rivers.

Piperno and her co-authors used the soil cores to create timelines of plant life and fire history at each location going back some 5,000 years. To do this, the team extracted long-lasting microfossil particles of dead plants called phytoliths and looked for traces of fire such as charcoal or soot. Fire, in a landscape that receives nearly 10 feet of rain annually, is nearly always human in origin and would have been instrumental in clearing large areas of land for human uses, such as agriculture and settlement.

The team identified which plant type each phytolith belonged to by comparing them with a comparative reference library of modern plants and used radiocarbon dating to reveal how long ago the plants lived. The dating of both phytoliths and charcoal determined the age of the plant fossils and any remnants of fire found in a core.

Finally, the researchers also conducted surveys of the modern forests found around each core. These forest inventories evinced the dizzying diversity of the region, yielding 550 tree species and 1,300 other species of plants.

Piperno said all the analyses pointed in the same direction: "We found no evidence for crop plants or slash and burn agriculture; no evidence for forest clearing; no evidence for the establishment of forest gardens. These are very similar to results from other regions of Amazonia. We now have a substantial amount of evidence that extensive, wholesale alterations of forest across the interfluvial areas of Amazonia did not occur in prehistory."

Instead, the researchers saw a rainforest ecosystem that remained relatively stable for thousands of years and is much like the ones still standing in similarly undisturbed regions today.

"This means that ecologists, soil scientists and climatologists looking to understand this region's ecological dynamics and capacity for storing carbon can be confident that they're studying forests that haven't been heavily modified by people," Piperno said.

But she says it also means we "should not assume the forests were once resilient in the face of significant past disturbance," and added that this has important implications for "good sustainable land use and conservation policies" because such policies "require adequate knowledge of past anthropogenic and natural impacts on the Amazonian ecosystem together with its responses."

In light of these results, Piperno and the research team also find the idea that reforestation following the arrival of Europeans triggered the Little Ice Age implausible.

"Without significant forest clearing in these and other regions studied by our team and others it appears unlikely that there was sufficient forest regeneration to have affected global carbon dioxide after European contact," Piperno said.

As for why there does not appear to have been any large-scale modification of the interfluvial Amazon, the simplest explanation for the pattern may be in the soil, which has so few nutrients that it would not have been desirable for crops and other plant manipulations compared to areas on riverbanks and floodplains.

Piperno said that more work still needs to be done in other yet unstudied regions away from riverbanks and floodplains to obtain a wider view of the vast Amazon and that the team's results do not imply that no form of Indigenous forest management occurred in the region, just that it was not intensive enough to show up in the soil cores.

"To me, these findings don't say that the Indigenous population wasn't using the forest, just that they used it sustainably and didn't modify its species composition very much," Piperno said. "We saw no decreases in plant diversity over the time period we studied. This is a place where humans appear to have been a positive force on this landscape and its biodiversity over thousands of years."

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Funding and support for this research were provided by the Smithsonian, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the European Research Council and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

CAPTION

An interior view of the Amazon Basin forests where scientists sampled soil cores for their study, with each site located at least a half-mile (about 1 kilometer) away from river courses and floodplains--regions known to scientists as interfluvial forests. The researchers also conducted surveys of the modern forests found around each core. These forest inventories evinced the dizzying diversity of the region, yielding 550 tree species and 1,300 other species of plants. Interfluvial forest comprises more than 90% of the Amazon's land area and is therefore crucial to determining the extent of Indigenous influence on the landscape. Smithsonian scientists and their collaborators have found new evidence that prehistoric Indigenous peoples did not significantly alter large swaths of forest ecosystems in the western Amazon, effectively preserving large areas of rainforests to be unmodified or used in sustainable ways that did not reshape their composition. The new findings are the latest in a long scientific debate about how people in the Amazon have historically shaped the rich biodiversity of the region and global climate systems, presenting new implications for how the Amazon's biodiversity and ecosystems can be best conserved and preserved today. The new study led by Smithsonian researchers, published June 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that for at least the past 5,000 years, large areas of the rainforest in western Amazonia located away from the fertile soils near rivers were not periodically cleared with fire or subject to intensive land use by the Indigenous population before the arrival of Europeans.

CREDIT

Corine Vriesendorp

CAPTION

Long-lasting microfossil particles of dead plants called phytoliths seen under a microscope, sampled from soil cores taken by scientists from the Amazon Basin. Most phytoliths studied by the team were smaller than the width of a human hair. Scientists used the soil cores to create timelines of plant life and fire history at each location going back some 5,000 years. To do this, the team extracted phytoliths and looked for traces of fire such as charcoal or soot. Fire, in a landscape that receives nearly 10 feet of rain annually, is nearly always human in origin and would have been instrumental in clearing large areas of land for human uses, such as agriculture and settlement. Smithsonian scientists and their collaborators have found new evidence that prehistoric Indigenous peoples did not significantly alter large swaths of forest ecosystems in the western Amazon, effectively preserving large areas of rainforests to be unmodified or used in sustainable ways that did not reshape their composition. The new findings are the latest in a long scientific debate about how people in the Amazon have historically shaped the rich biodiversity of the region and global climate systems, presenting new implications for how the Amazon's biodiversity and ecosystems can be best conserved and preserved today. The new study led by Smithsonian researchers, published June 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that for at least the past 5,000 years, large areas of the rainforest in western Amazonia located away from the fertile soils near rivers were not periodically cleared with fire or subject to intensive land use by the Indigenous population before the arrival of Europeans.?

CREDIT

Dolores Piperno, Smithsonian.

This forest has stayed wild for 5,000 years -- we can tell because of the soil

FIELD MUSEUM

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IMAGE: AERIAL VIEW OF THE PUTUMAYO REGION OF THE AMAZON RAINFOREST IN PERU. view more 

CREDIT: ALVARO DEL CAMPO, FIELD MUSEUM

We sometimes think of the Amazon rainforest as unaltered by humans, a peek into the planet's past. In recent years, scientists have learned that many parts of the Amazon aren't untouched at all--they've been cultivated by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, and mere centuries ago were the sites of cities and farmland. But that's not the case everywhere. In a new study in PNAS, researchers determined that a rainforest in the Putumayo region of Peru has been home to relatively unaltered forest for 5,000 years, meaning that the people who have lived there found a long-term way to coexist with nature--and the evidence is in microscopic bits of silica and charcoal in the soil.

"It's very hard even for experienced ecologists to tell the difference between a 2,000-year-old forest and a 200-year-old forest," says Nigel Pitman, an ecologist at Chicago's Field Museum and a co-author of the PNAS paper. "There's more and more research showing that many Amazonian forests we think of as wilderness are actually only 500 years old, because that's when the people who were living there died from the pandemics brought by Europeans, and the forest has regrown."

"Far from implying that complex, permanent human settlements in Amazonia had no influence over the landscape in some regions, our study adds substantially more evidence indicating the bulk of the Indigenous population's serious impact on the forested environment was concentrated in the nutrient-rich soils near rivers, and that their use of the surrounding rainforest was sustainable, causing no detectable species losses or disturbances, over millennia," says Dolores Piperno, a researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the study's first author.

Many plants take up silica from the soil and use it to produce microscopic mineral particles called phytoliths that provide structural support. After a plant dies, these phytoliths linger in the soil for thousands of years. Different kinds of plants produce differently-shaped phytoliths, meaning that phytoliths in the soil can be used to determine what kinds of plants lived there in the past.

For this study, Piperno and her colleague Crystal McMichael at the University of Amsterdam needed soil samples from the Putumayo region of the Amazon rainforest in northeastern Peru. That's where Pitman came in. In his work with the Field's Keller Science Action Center, Pitman takes part in "rapid inventories" of the Amazon, intensive information-gathering trips to document the plants and animals of a region and build relationships with the people who live there, in order to help build a case for protecting the area. Piperno and McMichael reached out to Pitman, a botanist, and asked if he'd be able to collect soil samples as he inventoried the Putumayo region's trees.

"The three or four days that we're at one of these sites feel like running a marathon. We have to get a lot done in a really short amount of time, and so we're up really early, we stay up really late, and somehow these soil cores had to be taken at the same time," says Pitman. "Sometimes we collected the soil at midnight, or during rainstorms, when we couldn't survey trees."

To collect the soil, Pitman and his colleagues, including Field Museum associates Juan Ernesto Guevara Andino, Marcos Ríos Paredes, and Luis A. Torres Montenegro, used a tool called an auger. "It's a long metal pole with blades at the bottom, and when you stick it in the ground and rotate it, it carves out a column of soil about 2 to 3 feet long." The team took samples of the soil at different heights on the column, placed them in plastic bags, and transported them back to the US for analysis.

The soil's age roughly correlates to its depth, with newer soil at the top and older soil deeper within the earth. Back in the lab, the researchers used carbon dating to determine the soil's age and then painstakingly sorted through samples under a microscope, searching for phytoliths that would tell them what kinds of plants were living in the area at a given time.

They found that the types of trees growing in the region today have been growing there over the past 5,000 years--an indicator that unlike in other parts of the Amazon, the Putumayo wasn't home to cities and farmland prior to European colonization.

In addition to phytoliths, the researchers also looked for microscopic bits of charcoal. "In the western Amazon where it's wet year-round, finding charcoal tells you that people were there," says Pitman. "There aren't natural forest fires from lightning strikes, so if something burns, it's because a person set it on fire."

The low levels of charcoal in the soil show that while the forest remained unaltered by humans for 5,000 years, people did live in the area--they just coexisted with the forest in a way that didn't change it.

"One of the scary things for conservationists about research showing that so much of the Amazon used to be towns and cropland, is that it's allowed people who aren't conservationists to say, 'If that was the case, then you conservationists are getting upset for no reason--500 years ago, half the Amazon was cut down and all grew back, it's no big deal. We don't have to worry so much about cutting down the Amazon, we've already done it and it turned out fine,'" says Pitman. This study suggests that while people are able to coexist with wilderness without altering it, the Amazon isn't simply a resource that can be destroyed and regrown from scratch in a matter of centuries.

"To me, these findings don't say that the Indigenous population wasn't using the forest, just that they used it sustainably and didn't modify its species composition very much," says Piperno. "We saw no decreases in plant diversity over the time period we studied. This is a place where humans appear to have been a positive force on this landscape and its biodiversity over thousands of years."

"It's an important finding, and a hopeful one, because it shows that people have been living in the Amazon for thousands of years, in a way that allows them to thrive and the forest to to thrive," says Pitman. "And since this particular forest is still being protected by Indigenous peoples, I hope this study reminds us all how important it is to support their work."

CAPTION

Soil samples collected in the rainforest.

CREDIT

Nigel Pitman, Field Museum

 

Toshiba announces breakthrough in long distance quantum communication

TOSHIBA CORPORATION

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CREDIT: TOSHIBA CORPORATION

Cambridge, UK, 7th June 2021: The Cambridge Research Laboratory of Toshiba Europe today announced the first demonstration of quantum communications over optical fibres exceeding 600 km in length. The breakthrough will enable long distance quantum-secured information transfer between metropolitan areas and is a major advance towards building the future Quantum Internet.

The term Quantum Internet describes a global network of quantum computers connected by long distance quantum communication links. It is expected to allow the ultrafast solution of complex optimization problems in the cloud, a more accurate global timing system and highly secure communications across the globe. Several large government initiatives to build a quantum internet have been announced, for example in the US, EU and China.

One of the most difficult technological challenges in building the quantum internet, is the problem of how to transmit quantum bits over long optical fibres. Small changes in the ambient conditions, such as temperature fluctuations, cause the fibres to expand and contract, thereby scrambling the fragile qubits, which are encoded as a phase delay of a weak optical pulse in the fibre.

Now Toshiba has demonstrated record distances for quantum communications by introducing a novel 'dual band' stabilisation technique. This sends two optical reference signals, at different wavelengths, for minimising the phase fluctuations on long fibres. The first wavelength is used to cancel the rapidly varying fluctuations, while the second wavelength, at the same wavelength as the optical qubits, is used for fine adjustment of the phase. After deploying these new techniques, Toshiba found it is possible to hold the optical phase of a quantum signal constant to within a fraction of a wavelength, with a precision of 10s of nanometers, even after propagation through 100s of km of fibre. Without cancelling these fluctuations in real time, the fibre would expand and contract with temperature changes, scrambling the quantum information.

The first application for dual band stabilization will be for long distance Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). Commercial QKD systems are limited to around 100-200 km of fibre. In 2018, Toshiba proposed the Twin Field QKD protocol as a way to extend the distance, and tested its resilience to optical loss using short fibres and attenuators. By introducing the dual band stabilization technique, Toshiba has now implemented Twin Field QKD on long fibres and demonstrated QKD over 600km, for the first time.

"This is a very exciting result," comments Mirko Pittaluga, first author of the article describing the results. "With the new techniques we have developed, further extensions of the communication distance for QKD are still possible and our solutions can also be applied to other quantum communications protocols and applications".

Andrew Shields, Head of the Quantum Technology Division at Toshiba Europe remarks, "QKD has been used to secure metropolitan area networks in recent years. This latest advance extends the maximum span of a quantum link, so that it is possible to connect cities across countries and continents, without using trusted intermediate nodes. Implemented along with Satellite QKD, it will allow us to build a global network for quantum secured communications."

Taro Shimada, Corporate Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Toshiba Corporation reflects, "With this success in Quantum Technology, Toshiba is willing to further expand its quantum business with rapid speed. Our vision is a platform for quantum information technology services, which will not only enable secure communication on a global scale, but also transformational technologies such as cloud-based quantum computing and distributed quantum sensing."

The details of the advancement are published today in the scientific journal, Nature Photonics. The work was partially funded by the EU through the H2020 project, OpenQKD. The team is now engineering the proposed solutions to simplify their future adoption and deployment.

This latest development follows the announcement last year that BT and Toshiba had installed the UK's first industrial quantum-secure network. Transmitting data between the National Composites Centre (NCC) and the Centre for Modelling & Simulation (CFMS), Toshiba's multiplexing compatibility allows the data and the quantum keys to be transmitted on the same fibre, eliminating the need for costly dedicated infrastructure for key distribution. The combined arrival of multiplexed QKD using existing infrastructure for shorter distances, alongside Twin Field QKD for longer distances, paves the way for a commercially viable global quantum-secure network.

QKD allows users to securely exchange confidential information (such as bank statements, health records, private calls) over an untrusted communication channel (such as the internet). It does that by distributing to the intended users a common secret key that can be used to encrypt, and thus protect, the information exchanged over the communication channel. The security of the secret key rests upon the fundamental properties of individual quantum systems (photons, the particles of light) which are encoded and transmitted for the key generation. In the event that these photons are intercepted by an undesignated user, quantum physics guarantees that the intended users can perceive the eavesdropping, and consequently protect the communication.

Unlike other existing security solutions, the security of quantum cryptography derives directly from the laws of physics we use to describe the world around us, and for this reason, it is secure against any future advances in mathematics and computing (including the advent of quantum computers). In light of this, QKD is expected to become an essential tool for protecting operation-critical communications for businesses and governments.

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For further information about the work of Toshiba's Quantum Information Group, go to http://www.quantum.toshiba.co.uk/

About Toshiba:

Toshiba Corporation leads a global group of companies that combines knowledge and capabilities from over 140 years of experience in a wide range of businesses--from energy and social infrastructure to electronic devices--with world-class capabilities in information processing, digital and AI technologies. These distinctive strengths support Toshiba's continued evolution toward becoming an Infrastructure Services Company that promotes data utilization and digitization, and one of the world's leading cyber-physical-systems technology companies. Guided by the Basic Commitment of the Toshiba Group, "Committed to People, Committed to the Future," Toshiba contributes to society's positive development with services and solutions that lead to a better world. The Group and its 120,000 employees worldwide secured annual sales surpassing 3.1 trillion yen (US$27.5 billion ) in fiscal year 2020.

Find out more about Toshiba at https://www.global.toshiba/ww/outline/corporate.html

About Toshiba Europe Ltd, Cambridge Research Lab:

The Cambridge Research Laboratory of Toshiba Europe Ltd conduct research on Computer Vision, Speech and Quantum Technologies. The Quantum Information Group is exploring the ultimate limit of Information Technology in which each bit is encoded on a single electron or photon. Notable past achievements include the first Quantum Cryptography system to operate over 100km of fibre, the first to operate with a secure key rate of 10 Mbit/sec and the first semiconductor light emitting diodes for single photons and entangled pairs. For further information on their work go to http://www.quantum.toshiba.co.uk

About the OPENQKD Project:

OPENQKD has the ambition to reinforce Europe's global position at the forefront of quantum communication capabilities. We aim to:

Demonstrate the transparent integration of quantum-safe solutions broadly across the European digital landscape.
Create several open QKD testbeds plus smaller demonstrators to promote network functionality and use-cases to potential end-users and relevant stakeholders.
Develop an innovation ecosystem and training ground and help to grow the technology and solution supply chains for quantum communication technologies and services.

THE RETURN OF THE MULLET; THE MANBOB OF THE ROARING TWENTIES

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Picture of Researcher at The Cambridge Research Laboratory of Toshiba Europe

CREDIT

Toshiba Corporation

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Picture of Researcher at The Cambridge Research Laboratory of Toshiba Europe

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Toshiba Corporation

 

Study: Malicious bots are the primary pathogen of COVID-19 misinformation on social media

ELEVATED SCIENCE COMMUNICATIONS

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La Jolla, Calif. (June 07, 2021) -- "The coronavirus pandemic has sparked what the World Health Organization has called an 'infodemic' of misinformation," said Dr. John W. Ayers, a scientist who specializes in public health surveillance. "But, bots --like those used by Russian agents during the 2016 American presidential election-- have been overlooked as a source of COVID-19 misinformation."

A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine led by Dr. Ayers, Co-Founder of the Center for Data Driven Health and Vice Chief of Innovation within the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of California San Diego in collaboration with the George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University suggests bots are the primary pathogen of COVID-19 misinformation on social media.

Identifying Bot Influence on Facebook Groups: A Case Study of Masks and COVID-19

The team identified public facebook groups that were heavily influenced by bots. The team measured how quickly the same URLs (or links) were shared in a sample of about 300,000 posts made to Facebook groups that shared 251,655 links.

When URLs are repeatedly shared by multiple accounts within seconds of one another, it indicates these are bot accounts controlled by automated software that coordinates their action. The team found that the Facebook groups most influenced by bots averaged 4.28 seconds between shares of identical links, compared to 4.35 hours for the Facebook groups least influenced by bots.

Among Facebook groups least or most influenced by bots, the team monitored posts that shared a link to the Danish Study to Assess Face Masks for the Protection Against COVID-19 Infection (DANMASK-19) randomized clinical trial published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. "We selected DANMASK-19 for our study because masks are an important public health measure to potentially control the pandemic and are a source of popular debate," said Dr. Davey Smith, study coauthor and Chief of Infectious Diseases at UC San Diego.

39 percent of all posts sharing the DANMASK-19 trial were made to Facebook groups that were the most influenced by bots. Whereas 9 percent of posts were made to Facebook groups the least influenced by bots.

20 percent of posts sharing the DANMASK-19 trial made to Facebook groups the most influenced by bots claimed masks harmed the wearer, contrary to scientific evidence. For example, one post read "Danish study proves...the harmfulness of wearing a mask." 50 percent of posts promoted conspiracies such as "corporate fact checkers are lying to you! All this to serve their Dystopian #Agenda2030 propaganda."

Posts sharing the DANMASK-19 trial made to Facebook groups the most influenced by bots were 2.3 times more likely to claim masks harm the wearer and 2.5 times more likely to make conspiratorial claims than posts made to Facebook groups made to Facebook groups the least influenced by bots.

The Threat of Automated Misinformation

"COVID-19 misinformation propaganda appears to be spreading faster than the virus itself," said Dr. Eric Leas, study coauthor and Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. "This is fueled by bots that can amplify misinformation at a rate far greater than ordinary users."

"Bots also appear to be undermining critical public health institutions. In our case study, bots mischaracterized a prominent publication from a prestigious medical journal to spread misinformation, said Brian Chu, study coauthor and medical student at UPenn. "This suggests that no content is safe from the dangers of weaponized misinformation."

"The amount of misinformation from bots we found suggests that bots' influence extends far beyond our case study," added Dr. Smith. "Could bots be fostering vaccine hesitancy or amplifying asian discrimination too?"

The team noted that the effect of automated misinformation is likely larger due to how it spills over into organic conversations on social media.

"Bots sharing misinformation could inspire ordinary people to propagate misinformed messages," said Zechariah Zhu, study coauthor and research associate with the Center for Data Drive Health at UC San Diego. "For example, bots may make platforms' algorithms think that automated content is more popular than it actually is, which can then lead to platforms actually prioritizing misinformation and disseminating it to an even larger audience," added Dr. David A. Broniatowski, Associate Director of the GW Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, and study coauthor.

A Call to Action to Address Automated Misinformation

"We must remember that unknown entities are working to deceive the public and promote misinformation. Their dangerous actions directly affect the public's health," said Dr. Mark Dredze, the John C. Malone Associate Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and study coauthor.

Yet, solutions to eliminate bots and their misinformation campaigns are at hand the team notes.

"Our work shows that social media platforms have the ability to detect, and therefore remove, these coordinated bot campaigns," added Dr. Broniatowski. "Efforts to purge deceptive bots from social media platforms must become a priority among legislators, regulators, and social media companies who have instead been focused on targeting individual pieces of misinformation from ordinary users."

"If we want to correct the 'infodemic,' eliminating bots on social media is the necessary first step," concluded Dr. Ayers. "Unlike controversial strategies to censor actual people, silencing automated propaganda is something everyone can and should support."

###

Spread of Misinformation About Face Masks and COVID-19 by Automated Software on Facebook

John W. Ayers, PhD, MA1; Brian Chu, BS2; Zechariah Zhu3; et alEric C. Leas, PhD, MPH4; Davey M. Smith, MD, MAS1; Mark Dredze, PhD5; David A. Broniatowski, PhD, SM6
Author Affiliations Article Information

JAMA Intern Med. Published online June 7, 2021. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.2498

The dangers of misinformation spreading on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic are known.1 However, software that allows individuals to generate automated content and share it via counterfeit accounts (or “bots”)2 to amplify misinformation has been overlooked, including how automated software can be used to disseminate original research while undermining scientific communication.

We analyzed conversations on public Facebook groups, a platform known to be susceptible to automated misinformation,3 concerning the publication of the Danish Study to Assess Face Masks for the Protection Against COVID-19 Infection (DANMASK-19) to explore automated misinformation.4 We selected DANMASK-19 because it was widely discussed (it was the fifth most shared research article of all time as of March 2021 according to Altmetric5) and demonstrated that masks are an important public health measure to control the pandemic.

Methods

Sample

We obtained the names of 563 Facebook groups in which a link to the publication of DANMASK-19 on the Annals of Internal Medicine website was posted and downloaded all available posts (N = 299 925) from these groups using CrowdTangle (crowdtangle.com). We limited our study period to the 5 days following the publication of DANMASK-19 (November 18, 2020, through November 22, 2020) because media interest is typically greatest initially. This study was exempted as not human participants research by the University of California, San Diego Human Research Protections Program. Additional details are provided in the eAppendix in the Supplement.

Measures

When identical links are posted in close succession, it suggests that automated software was used.2,3 We identified the subsets of Facebook groups that were the most or least likely to be affected by automation by calculating the frequency that identical links were posted to pairs of Facebook groups and the time that elapsed between these posts for all links (n = 251 656) shared during the study period. Adapting past operationalizations,3 a pair of Facebook groups that (1) hosted identical links 5 or more times and (2) at least half of these links being posted within less than 10 seconds would be considered the most affected by automation. Comparatively, Facebook groups in which the total time elapsed between identical links was in the top 90th percentage of time between postings were considered the least affected by automation. Facebook groups that were most affected by automation had a mean (SD) of 4.28 (3.02) seconds between shares of identical links compared with 4.35 (11.71) hours for those least affected by automation.

To quantify the extent to which Facebook groups were subject to misinformation, all posts that linked to DANMASK-19 in the groups most or least affected by automation were qualitatively coded by 2 authors (B.C. and Z.Z.) for 2 types of misinformation: (1) whether the primary conclusion of DANMASK-19 was misrepresented (eg, mask wearing harms the wearer) and (2) whether conspiratorial claims were made about DANMASK-19 (eg, claims of covert political/corporate control). A separate outcome for not including either form of misinformation was computed. Table 1 presents example posts. Coders disagreed on 3.9% of labels (Cohen κ = 0.76) and resolved disagreements unanimously with the first author (J.W.A.).
Analysis

The percentage of posts that linked to DANMASK-19 that included each type of misinformation or neither type was calculated separately for the sets of Facebook groups most and least affected by automation along with prevalence ratios comparing these percentages. Statistical significance was set to P < .05 and 95% confidence intervals were bootstrapped. Analyses were computed with R, version 3.6.1 (R Foundation).
Results

A total of 712 posts that provided direct links to DANMASK-19 were shared in 563 public Facebook groups. Of these, 279 posts (39%) that linked to DANMASK-19 were in Facebook groups most affected by automation, of which 17 were deleted and unavailable for further analysis. Sixty-two posts (9%) were made in Facebook groups that were least affected by automation, and 3 were deleted.

Among posts made to groups most affected by automation, 19.8% (95% CI,14.9%-24.5%) claimed masks harmed the wearer, 50.8% (95% CI, 44.6%-56.5%) made conspiratorial claims about the trial, and 43.9% (95% CI, 37.4%-49.6%) made neither claim (Table 2). In contrast, among posts made to groups least affected by automation, 8.5% (95% CI, 1.7%-15.2%) claimed masks harmed the wearer, 20.3% (95% CI, 10.2%-30.5%) made conspiratorial claims about the trial, and 72.9% (95% CI, 59.3%-81.4%) made neither claim.

The percentage of posts linking to DANMASK-19 that claimed that masks harmed the wearer was 2.3 (95% CI, 1.0-6.5) times higher in Facebook groups that were most affected by automation vs groups that were least affected by automation; conspiratorial claims (prevalence ratio, 2.5; 95% CI, 1.5-4.5) were also higher in Facebook groups that were most affected by automation. Making neither claim was more common in Facebook groups that were least affected by automation (prevalence ratio, 0.6; 95%CI, 0.5-0.7).
Discussion

A campaign that presumably used automated software6 promoted DANMASK-19 on Facebook groups to disseminate misinformation. The limitations of the study include that the entities responsible for organizing this automated campaign cannot be determined, only public Facebook groups were studied, and only a single high-profile study over a few days was evaluated.

Scientific journals are easy targets of automated software. Possible approaches to prevent misinformation due to dissemination of articles by automated software include legislation that penalizes those behind automation; greater enforcement of rules by social media companies to prohibit automation; and counter-campaigns by health experts.

Article Information

Accepted for Publication: April 15, 2021.

Published Online: June 7, 2021. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.2498

Corresponding Author: John W. Ayers, PhD MA; #333 CRSF 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093 (ayers.john.w@gmail.com).

Author Contributions: Drs Ayers and Broniatowski had full access to all of the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

Concept and design: All authors.

Acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: Ayers, Chu, Zhu, Leas, Smith, Broniatowski.

Drafting of the manuscript: Ayers, Chu, Zhu, Leas, Smith, Broniatowski.

Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: All authors.

Statistical analysis: Chu, Leas, Broniatowski.

Obtained funding: Smith.

Administrative, technical, or material support: Chu, Smith, Dredze, Broniatowski.

Supervision: Smith, Dredze, Broniatowski.

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr Ayers reported owning equity in Directing Medicine, Health Watcher, and Good Analytics outside the submitted work. Dr Leas reported receiving consulting fees from Health Watcher and Good Analytics for similar work outside the context of these analyses. Dr Smith reported an endowment from the John and Mary Tu Foundation Endowment and grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study and consulting fees from FluxErgy, Bayer, Arena Pharmaceuticals, and Linear Therapies outside the submitted work. Dr Dredze reported personal fees from Bloomberg LP and Good Analytics outside the submitted work. No other disclosures were reported.

Funding/Support: This work was supported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, National Institutes of Health grant AI036214, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to the George Washington University Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, and The John and Mary Tu Foundation.

Role of the Funder/Sponsor: The funding organizations had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Data Sharing Statement: The data used in the study are public in nature and are available from CrowdTangle. CrowdTangle prohibits providing raw data to anyone outside of a CrowdTangle user’s account. Anyone with a CrowdTangle account may access these corresponding data. Researchers may request CrowdTangle access at https://help.crowdtangle.com/en/articles/4302208-crowdtangle-for-academics-and-researchers.

Additional Contributions: We appreciate discussions and editing with Benjamin M. Althouse, PhD, ScM (Gates Foundation), Alicia Nobles, PhD (University of California, San Diego) and Christopher Longhurst MD (University of California San Diego). They were not compensated for their contributions.
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