Is COVID-19 Immune to Misinformation? A Brief Overview

Abstract

During the current COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation is a major challenge, raising several social and psychological concerns. This article highlights the prevailing misinformation as an outbreak containing hoaxes, myths, and rumours. In comparison to traditional media, online media platforms facilitate misinformation even more widely. To further affirm this ethical concern, the researchers cite relevant studies demonstrating the role of new media in misinformation and its potential consequences. Besides other significant psychosocial impacts, such as xenophobia, psychological distress, LGBT rights violation, gender-based violence, misinformation is undermining healthcare workers' psychological health and their efforts to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. In view of the adverse consequences of misinformation, this article addresses it as a massive ethical challenge during the current outbreak. Thus, the researchers make relevant suggestions to evaluate misinformation sources and mitigate the psychosocial impacts attributed to misinformation during crises. They include forming mental health teams comprising of psychologists, psychiatrists, and trained paramedical staff; rapid dissemination of authentic and updated COVID-19 situation reports regularly; establishing helpline services; and recognizing a broader range of personal needs. All health authorities should make clear that they are listening and responding to public concerns. Much effort is needed to counteract COVID-19 misinformation.

Social Media Use and Covid-19 Risk Perception Among Nigerians: The Roles of Affects, Gender and Information Sources

“…For instance, fear and anger were reported as the most prevalent emotions/affects associated with the Ebola virus disease outbreak in Nigeria (Ogoina, 2016) and South Korea's MERS outbreak (Do et al, 2016;Oh et al, 2020). Studies have also shown the predominance of both emotions among the public since the occurrence of COVID-19 (Choi, Hui & Wan, 2020;Malta, Rimoin & Strathdee, 2020;Peeri et al, 2020;Ali et al, 2021).…”

“…However, this media category also suffers from the spread of fake news (Shafi & Ravikumar, 2018). Fake news is getting rampant on many social media platforms, particularly health-related information (Apuke & Omar, 2020;Ali, Khalid & Zahid, 2021). Social media risk information are often laced with different psychological or emotional affects, such as fear, worry, anger, and happiness (Do, Lim, Kim, & Choi, 2016;Han & Liu, 2018;Guidry, Meganck, Perrin, Messner, Lovari, & Caryle, 2020).…”

A Review of Misinformation Across Disciplines: Implication for Online Education

“…Combating misinformation, scholars recommend strategies to deal with online education. These strategies include, for example, (1) creating team work among professional disciplines for credible resources [40,50], (2) delivering diverse professional opinions for accurate information dissemination [26], (3) updating regularly by authoritative agencies about scientific information via support of social media [50], (4) helping people to critically evaluate information using emotional and community support [53], (5) offering informational literacy education with affective support [26; 40], (6) recognizing personal needs in evaluating sources [2], (7) using detective models and regulative devices on social media to ensure publishing only scientific information for public good (e.g., flag suspicious information to warn people, [32]), and (8) promoting equitable society to help eliminate misinformation which disproportionally impacted the marginalized minorities due to race, gender, class, ethnicity, and socioeconomic statuses [14].…”

“…In addition, there are differences between this review and other existing reviews on the foci of misinformation. The existing reviews [2, 50; 54] include a collection of disciplinary specific misinformation research related to COVID or health science fields (e.g., [31] reviewed health misinformation online), may or may not include online education as their foci, may or may not write "misinformation" in their title, may or may not review the most recent literature of misinformation including pandemic explorative scope of misinformation research, or may or may not discuss misinformation from an online education viewpoint (e.g., [2] reviewed COVID misinformation but not with an educational foci).…”

“…These items fell outside of the parameters defined for the present systematic review, which was designed to examine only misinformation publications that were clearly identified through the title as having a focus. However, some usable articles and papers were found in the existing reviews of misinformation [2,50,54] and these items extended the sample beyond those publications obtained through the database searches.…”