COVID-19 information disorder: six types of harmful information during the pandemic in Europe

Abstract

The outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 propelled the creation, transmission, and consumption of false informationunverified claims, misleading statements, false rumours, conspiracy theories, and so onall around the world. When various official or unofficial sources issue erroneous, misleading or contradicting information during a crisis, people who are exposed to this may behave in ways that cause harm to the health and well-being of themselves or others, e.g., by not taking appropriate risk reducing measures or blaming or harassing vulnerable groups. To work towards a typology of informational content that may increase people's vulnerability in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, we explored 98 instances of potentially harmful information that spread in six European countries-France, Italy, Norway, Finland, Lithuania, and Estoniabetween March and May 2020. We suggest that during the pandemic, exposure to harmful information may have made people more vulnerable in six ways: (1) by discouraging appropriate protective actions against catching/spreading the virus, (2) by promoting the use of false (or harmful) remedies against the virus, (3) by misrepresenting the transmission mechanisms of the virus, (4) by downplaying the risks related to the pandemic, (5) by tricking people into buying fake protection against the virus or into revealing their confidential information, and (6) by victimising the alleged spreaders of the virus by harassment/hate speech. The proposed typology can be used to guide the development of risk communication plans to address each of these information-related vulnerabilities.

Dual pathway model of conspiracy beliefs: Interactions between epistemic and socio-existential needs and resources

“…Chan et al, 2020;Latkin et al, 2021). Indeed, many of situational, individual, and socio-cultural factors of vulnerability to misinformation overlap with the factors listed here, such as lower information literacy, minority membership, distrust in media and authorities, and political polarisation (Hansson et al, 2021;Pickles et al, 2021). Though it was outside of the scope of the current paper, a larger overview may be able to also encompass misinformation and scepticism (as well as other content and/or mechanisms, such as other epistemically suspect beliefs).…”

Learning from Each Other—A Bibliometric Review of Research on Information Disorders

“…In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, we are simultaneously facing an informational pathology with dramatic effects on the human psyche and, consequently, on its health [15]. Moreover, the infodemia and mistrust feed into each other, therefore disinformation can have devastating effects on society, causing division between groups, social tensions, weakening the rule of law and creating general confusion [67].…”

“…The second cluster with motor themes, emerging media, must be understood in the context of online social networks and revolutionary technologies, which have fundamentally changed the way information is produced, consumed and transmitted: media (102 items), machine learning (86), fake news detection (66), deep learning (62), social network (52), natural language processing (49), artificial intelligence (35), sentiment analysis (32), classification (30), online social networks (28), data mining (27), reliability (20), transparency (18), privacy (18), advertising ( 17), text mining (17), rumor detection (17), crowdsourcing ( 16), text classification (15), blockchain (15).…”

“…Researching information disorders is a challenging task and any study has limitations. If Hansson et al [15] identify six types of harmful information during the pandemic in Europe, Kapantai et al [11] (p. 1) reported that, although there is rich scientific literature on diverse topics, it does not address ID in a unitary way. It only deals separately with its elements, with "no commonly agreed typology framework, specific categorization criteria".…”

‘Information Disorder’: Sample of Syrians in Turkey

“…Misinformation, (Wardle, 2018a) on the other hand, is information that is wrong but not created to harm others. For instance, false information about COVID-19 (Hansson et al, 2021) and its treatment have been spreading around digital platforms but mostly intention of online users is to help others to learn about treatment methods or gain awareness on COVID-19 outbreak. Same thing can be said for vaccine hesitancy.…”