![]() ![]() ![]() Each of the four implications is discussed below.įirst, our study confirms the prevalence of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. Our findings also have implications for public health authorities and social media platforms in devising intervention strategies. Our study addresses a timely public health concern regarding misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine circulating on social media and provides four major implications that can inform the strategies that fact checkers adopt to combat misinformation. These platforms can also function as an incubator for anti-vaxxers to circulate ideas and coordinate their offline activities (Wilson & Wiysonge, 2020). Social media’s network features can easily amplify the voice of conspiracy theorists and give credence to fringe beliefs that would otherwise remain obscure. However, social media platforms have exacerbated the problem to a different level. Rumor-mongering in times of crisis is nothing new. It includes deliberate attempts to disseminate wrong information to undermine the public health response and advance alternative agendas of groups or individuals.” that is, the massive dissemination of false information, is one of the “most concerning” challenges of our time alongside the pandemic. The World Health Organization warned that the “infodemic,” 2 According to the World Health Organization (2020), an infodemic is “an overabundance of information, both online and offline. The spread of misinformation on social media has been identified as a major threat to public health, particularly in the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines (Burki, 2020 Loomba et al., 2021). They can achieve such goals through network intervention strategies such as promoting similar URLs as a fact checker community. For organizational and individual fact checkers, they need to strategically coordinate their actions, diversify connections, and occupy more central positions in the URL co-sharing networks.This study suggests that when public accounts debunk misinformation on social media, repeating the original false claim in their debunking posts can be an effective strategy at least to generate user engagement.The accounts with the largest number of connections, and that were connected with the most diverse contacts, were fake news accounts, Trump-supporting groups, and anti-vaccine groups.Fact checkers’ posts were mostly connected with other fact checkers rather than misinformation spreaders.Additionally, we found that people were more likely to comment on fact-checking posts that repeated the original false claims than other types of posts.Of the fact-checking posts, 28.5% repeated the original false claim within their correction, while 18.9% listed facts without misinformation repetition. Our analysis found that approximately half of the posts (46.6%) that discussed COVID-19 vaccines were misinformation, and the other half (47.4%) were fact-checking posts.This study used social network analysis and ANOVA tests to analyze posts (written in English) on public Facebook accounts that mentioned COVID-19 vaccines misinformation posted between March 1 st, 2020 and March 1 st, 2021, and user reactions to such posts. ![]() How do these sources differ in terms of co-sharing URLs?.How do Facebook users react to different types of Facebook posts containing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation in terms of behavioral engagement and emotional responses?.What types of information sources discuss COVID-19 vaccine-related misinformation on Facebook?.This demonstrates the remarkable ability of misinformation spreaders to coordinate communication strategies across topics. However, we found that misinformation spreaders were far more likely to take on central positions in the misinformation URL co-sharing network than fact checkers. In particular, fact checkers’ posts that repeat the original misinformation received significantly more comments than posts from misinformation spreaders. Our analysis shows that, on Facebook, there are almost as many fact checkers as misinformation spreaders. further dividing the latter group into those who repeat misinformation to debunk the false claim and those who share correct information without repeating the misinformation. We first identify misinformation spreaders and fact checkers, 1 fact checker in our study is defined as any public account (including both individual and organizational accounts) that posts factual information about COVID-19 vaccine or posts debunking information about COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. Our study examines Facebook posts containing nine prominent COVID-19 vaccine misinformation topics that circulated on the platform between March 1 st, 2020 and March 1 st, 2021.
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