Into the Belly of the Beast: The Research on Social Media and Covid-19 Misinformation in 2020

Abstract

In this paper we present some preliminary findings from an ongoing research on a comprehensive corpus of 378 interdisciplinary studies about misinformation and COVID-19 published in 2020, focusing on the role of social media platforms in spreading and countering mis- and disinformation. We followed the PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews to collect and screen results, and a coding scheme based on methodological and substantive questions to analyze them. The preliminary results show, among others, that research on COVID-19 misinformation reproduces a well-known trend of differentiated attention to social media platforms based on both popularity among users and ease of access to data by scholars, that online survey distributed via social media has been a very popular approach, and the presence of a wide range of perspectives, and sometimes diverging point of views, on problematic information, in terms of prevalence of misinformation, countermeasures, and the role of social media communication. During the conference presentation, comprehensive results from the research will be presented.