Zhao Y, Zhu S, Wan Q, Li T, Zou C, Wang H, Deng S. Understanding How and by Whom COVID-19 Misinformation is Spread on Social Media: Coding and Network Analyses.
J Med Internet Res 2022;
24:e37623. [PMID:
35671411 PMCID:
PMC9217148 DOI:
10.2196/37623]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/28/2022] [Revised: 05/10/2022] [Accepted: 06/07/2022] [Indexed: 11/17/2022] Open
Abstract
Background
During global health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, rapid spread of misinformation on social media has occurred. The misinformation associated with COVID-19 has been analyzed, but little attention has been paid to developing a comprehensive analytical framework to study its spread on social media.
Objective
We propose an elaboration likelihood model–based theoretical model to understand the persuasion process of COVID-19–related misinformation on social media.
Methods
The proposed model incorporates the central route feature (content feature) and peripheral features (including creator authority, social proof, and emotion). The central-level COVID-19–related misinformation feature includes five topics: medical information, social issues and people’s livelihoods, government response, epidemic spread, and international issues. First, we created a data set of COVID-19 pandemic–related misinformation based on fact-checking sources and a data set of posts that contained this misinformation on real-world social media. Based on the collected posts, we analyzed the dissemination patterns.
Results
Our data set included 11,450 misinformation posts, with medical misinformation as the largest category (n=5359, 46.80%). Moreover, the results suggest that both the least (4660/11,301, 41.24%) and most (2320/11,301, 20.53%) active users are prone to sharing misinformation. Further, posts related to international topics that have the greatest chance of producing a profound and lasting impact on social media exhibited the highest distribution depth (maximum depth=14) and width (maximum width=2355). Additionally, 97.00% (2364/2437) of the spread was characterized by radiation dissemination.
Conclusions
Our proposed model and findings could help to combat the spread of misinformation by detecting suspicious users and identifying propagation characteristics.
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