Twitter and Facebook posts about COVID-19 are less likely to spread misinformation compared to other health topics

The COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread attention to an "infodemic" of potential health misinformation. This claim has not been assessed based on evidence. We evaluated if health misinformation became more common during the pandemic. We gathered about 325 million posts sharing URLs from T...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-01, Vol.17 (1), p.e0261768-e0261768
Main Authors: Broniatowski, David A, Kerchner, Daniel, Farooq, Fouzia, Huang, Xiaolei, Jamison, Amelia M, Dredze, Mark, Quinn, Sandra Crouse, Ayers, John W
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computer and Information Sciences
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
COVID-19 - epidemiology
COVID-19 - transmission
COVID-19 - virology
Credibility
Digital media
Disinformation
Humans
Infodemic
Information management
Medicine and Health Sciences
Pandemics
Public Health
SARS-CoV-2 - isolation & purification
Social Media
Social networks
Social Sciences
Software
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread attention to an "infodemic" of potential health misinformation. This claim has not been assessed based on evidence. We evaluated if health misinformation became more common during the pandemic. We gathered about 325 million posts sharing URLs from Twitter and Facebook during the beginning of the pandemic (March 8-May 1, 2020) compared to the same period in 2019. We relied on source credibility as an accepted proxy for misinformation across this database. Human annotators also coded a subsample of 3000 posts with URLs for misinformation. Posts about COVID-19 were 0.37 times as likely to link to "not credible" sources and 1.13 times more likely to link to "more credible" sources than prior to the pandemic. Posts linking to "not credible" sources were 3.67 times more likely to include misinformation compared to posts from "more credible" sources. Thus, during the earliest stages of the pandemic, when claims of an infodemic emerged, social media contained proportionally less misinformation than expected based on the prior year. Our results suggest that widespread health misinformation is not unique to COVID-19. Rather, it is a systemic feature of online health communication that can adversely impact public health behaviors and must therefore be addressed.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0261768