INFODEMIC WITH MISINFORMATION AND DISINFORMATION IN PANDEMIC COVID-19 SITUATION: A GLOBAL CASE STUDY (original) (raw)

Curbing the COVID-19 digital infodemic: strategies and tools

Journal of Public Health Policy, 2023

A problematic manifestation of the COVID-19 pandemic is a related digital 'infodemic' with widespread dissemination of rumors, conspiracy theories, and other misinformation about the impact of the crisis on aspects of political and socioeconomic life. Those spreading the misleading information did so through social media. In response, public, private and non-government stakeholders around the world have proposed a wide range of e-government policy approaches to combat this new digital phenomenon. For this Viewpoint I identified, analyzed, and classified the most interesting strategies, platforms, and tools proposed or already used by public decision-makers to combat the spread of false information related to the pandemic in a digital society.

Managing News Overload (MNO): The COVID-19 Infodemic

Information

A crucial area in which information overload is experienced is news consumption. Ever increasing sources and formats are becoming available through a combination of traditional and new (digital) media, including social media. In such an information and media rich environment, understanding how people access and manage news during a global health epidemic like COVID-19 becomes even more important. The designation of the current situation as an infodemic has raised concerns about the quality, accuracy and impact of information. Instances of misinformation are commonplace due, in part, to the speed and pervasive nature of social media and messaging applications in particular. This paper reports on data collected using media diaries from 15 university students in the United Arab Emirates documenting their news consumption in April 2020. Faced with a potentially infinite amount of information and news, participants demonstrate how they are managing news overload (MNO) using a number of c...

Combating COVID-19 Infodemic: A Step Towards Building Public Trust

Background: The spread of misinformation about different health issues, has become a growing threat nowadays. The process of identifying credible information became a real problem of high urgency. It took a new dimension with the creation of numerous web platforms and ubiquity of internet coverage. During the current pandemic of COVID-19, misinformation is not the only challenge, but infodemic is another serious consequence of the growing digitization. Infodemic is defined as an excessive amount of information about a problem that is typically unreliable, false or misleading, spreads rapidly, and makes a solution more difficult to achieve. This causes anxiety and mistrust in health authorities, leading to decrease capacities for decision-making and undermining public responses, especially during disease outbreaks or pandemics. Aim: The current study was designed to evaluate the effect of implementing a digital intervention training module, to educate participants about choosing cred...

CoVerifi: A COVID-19 News Verification System

Online Social Networks and Media, 2021

There is an abundance of misinformation, disinformation, and "fake news" related to COVID-19, leading the director-general of the World Health Organization to term this an 'infodemic'. Given the high volume of COVID-19 content on the Internet, many find it difficult to evaluate veracity. Vulnerable and marginalized groups are being misinformed and subject to high levels of stress. Riots and panic buying have also taken place due to "fake news". However, individual research-led websites can make a major difference in terms of providing accurate information. For example, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center website has over 81 million entries linked to it on Google. With the outbreak of COVID-19 and the knowledge that deceptive news has the potential to measurably affect the beliefs of the public, new strategies are needed to prevent the spread of misinformation. This study seeks to make a timely intervention to the information landscape through a COVID-19 "fake news", misinformation, and disinformation website. In this article, we introduce CoVerifi, a web application which combines both the power of machine learning and the power of human feedback to assess the credibility of news. By allowing users the ability to "vote" on news content, the CoVerifi platform will allow us to release labelled data as open source, which will enable further research on preventing the spread of COVID-19-related misinformation. We discuss the development of CoVerifi and the potential utility of deploying the system at scale for combating the COVID-19 "infodemic".

Mitigating misinformation about the COVID-19 infodemic on social media: A conceptual framework

Jàmbá Journal of Disaster Risk Studies

During coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the term ‘infodemic’ was used to depict the abundance of information about COVID-19 on social media that may overwhelm users, as well as misinformation about the virus because of the lack of authentication of information posted on social media. Both the World Health Organization and United Nations have warned that infodemics can become a severe threat to health care if misinformation on social media is not addressed in a timely manner. The objective of this study was to develop a conceptual framework that can be used to mitigate misinformation about the COVID-19 infodemic on social media. A structured literature review of purposively sampled scholarly publications from academic databases was conducted. The inclusion criteria chosen were scholarly papers that investigated infodemics on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic in the past 4 years, which were analysed using thematic and content analysis. The conceptual framework used Activit...

Infodemic monikers in Social Media during COVID-19 pandemic

Asia Pacific Journal of Health Management, 2020

Social media is a common platform that enables its users to share opinions, personal experiences, perspectives with one another instantaneously, globally. It has played a paramount role during pandemics such as COVID-19 and unveiled itself as a crucial means to communicate between the sources and the individuals. However, it also has become a place to disseminate misinformation and fake news rapidly. Infodemic, a plethora of information, some authentic some not makes it even harder to general people to receive factual and trustworthy information when required, has grown to be a major risk to public health and social media is developing as a trendy platform for this infodemic. This commentary aims to explore how social media has affected the current situation. We also aim to share our insight to control this misinformation. This commentary contributes to evolving knowledge to counter fake news or health-related information shared over various social media platforms.

Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic in Social Media: A Holistic Perspective and a Call to Arms

2021

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, people turned to social media to read and to share timely information including statistics, warnings, advice, and inspirational stories. Unfortunately, alongside all this useful information, there was also a new blending of medical and political misinformation and disinformation, which gave rise to the first global infodemic. While fighting this infodemic is typically thought of in terms of factuality, the problem is much broader as malicious content includes not only fake news, rumors, and conspiracy theories, but also promotion of fake cures, panic, racism, xenophobia, and mistrust in the authorities, among others. This is a complex problem that needs a holistic approach combining the perspectives of journalists, fact-checkers, policymakers, government entities, social media platforms, and society as a whole. Taking them into account we define an annotation schema and detailed annotation instructions, which reflect these perspectives. We...

COVID 19 Digital Platforms Response to Information Disorder Takshashila Discussion Document

The Takshashila Institution, 2020

This Discussion Document analyses the responses of digital platforms to the information disorders around COVID-19: During the pandemic, digital platforms may be able to exercise greater discretion in content moderation from increased calls for them to act as arbiters of truth. Efforts to contain information disorders vary across the following areas: Changes in Information Flows: Platforms have made alterations to how information is spread. Funding: Platforms have invested significant sums of money into fact checking organisations, journalists, and media outlets. Changes in User Interface (UI): Platforms have made changes to their UIs to highlight credible information from public health authorities. Policy: Platforms have reacted by coming up with new policies, modifying existing policies, and deploying existing policies to deal with COVID-related information disorders. Level and consistency of actions taken differ across geographies and types of actors. Platforms’ response in controlling misinformation may lead to significant changes in the relationships between the government, society, and people.