COVID-19 fake news diffusion across Latin America

Abstract

Fact-checking verifies a multitude of claims and remains a promising solution to fight fake news. The spread of rumors, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories online is evident in times of crisis, when fake news ramped up across platforms, increasing fear and confusion among the population as seen in the COVID-19 pandemic. This article explores fact-checking initiatives in Latin America, using an original Markov-based computational method to cluster topics on tweets and identify their diffusion between different datasets. Drawing on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, including time-series analysis, network analysis and in-depth close reading, our article proposes an in-depth tracing of COVID-related false information across the region, comparing if there is a pattern of behavior through the countries. We rely on the open Twitter application programming interface connection to gather data from public accounts of the six major fact-checking agencies in Latin America, namely Argentina (Chequeado), Brazil (Agência Lupa), Chile (Mala Espina Check), Colombia (Colombia Check from Consejo de Redacciín), Mexico (El Sabueso from Animal Polótico) and Venezuela (Efecto Cocuyo). In total, these profiles account for 102,379 tweets that were collected between January and July 2020. Our study offers insights into the dynamics of online information dissemination beyond the national level and demonstrates how politics intertwine with the health crisis in this period. Our method is capable of clustering topics in a period of overabundance of information, as we fight not only a pandemic but also an infodemic, evidentiating opportunities to understand and slow the spread of false information.

Prevalence and Factors Associated with Parents’ Non-Intention to Vaccinate Their Children and Adolescents against COVID-19 in Latin America and the Caribbean

“…However, this does not agree with a study that evaluated the HPV vaccine hesitancy among parents in Italy, which found no difference between knowing that the HPV vaccine was a preventive measure for this disease and educational level [37]. This could be explained by an infodemic that occurred in LAC countries during 2020 [38,39] and could equally affect people of different educational levels.…”

COVID‐19 in Latin America and the Caribbean: Two years of the pandemic

“…A reason for this includes the overwhelming amount of news connected to treatment solutions for COVID‐19, usually originating from social media platforms. Fake news started gaining political value within the region, tempting individuals to make false claims or reach for ineffective solutions to the pandemic [ 68 ]. Trends of increased COVID‐19 mortality in LAC have been linked to higher use and trust of social media as a means of obtaining health information [ 69 ].…”

Prevalence and Predictors of Intention to be Vaccinated Against COVID-19 in Thirteen Latin American and Caribbean Countries

“…Therefore, it is not surprising that, in this study, people who have social networks as their main source of information have the lowest intention to be vaccinated against COVID-19. A previous study indicated that the proportion of misinformation about vaccines was higher in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela than in other Latin American countries (Ceron et al, 2021 ). This could be associated with the ease of social networks to spread inaccurate information about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines (Wilson & Wiysonge, 2020 ).…”