Libraries Fight Disinformation: An Analysis of Online Practices to Help Users’ Generations in Spotting Fake News

Abstract

The work of libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, as facilitators of reliable information on health issues, has shown that these entities can play an active role as verification agents in the fight against disinformation (false information that is intended to mislead), focusing on media and informational literacy. To help citizens, these entities have developed a wide range of actions that range from online seminars, to learning how to evaluate the quality of a source, to video tutorials or the creation of repositories with resources of various natures. To identify the most common media literacy practices in the face of fake news (news that conveys or incorporates false, fabricated, or deliberately misleading information), this exploratory study designed an ad hoc analysis sheet, validated by the inter-judge method, which allowed one to classify the practices of N = 216 libraries from all over the world. The results reveal that the libraries most involved in this task are those belonging to public universities. Among the actions carried out to counteract misinformation, open-access materials that favor self-learning stand out. These resources, aimed primarily at university students and adults in general, are aimed at acquiring skills related to fact-checking and critical thinking. Therefore, libraries vindicate their role as components of the literacy triad, together with professors and communication professionals.

Current issues and status of mis/disinformation in the health library context: a rapid literature review

“…Disinformation was defined as "inaccurate information that is intentionally produced and disseminated for political, economic, or cultural reasons" Ashrafi-Rizi and Kazempour (2020) cited in ; "false information that is intended to mislead" (Herrero-Diz & Lopez-Rufino, 2021); and "intentionally misleading information used to obfuscate legitimate resources" . Looking at the definitions of mis/disinformation, most authors did not explicitly define misinformation or disinformation.…”

“…Firstly, authors referred to types of mis/disinformation that fell under definitions, synonyms, or categories of misinformation, encompassing terms such as falsehoods, deceptive or baseless information, misinformation circulated online or on social media, fake news, and generally any content characterised as disinformative, pseudohistorical, or pseudoscientific (Bianchini et al, 2019;Herrero-Diz & Lopez-Rufino, 2021;Jaeger & Taylor, 2021;Schneider et al, 2020). Publication date of articles* COVID-19-related misinformation Eight papers addressed COVID-19-related misinformation, discussing aspects such as the infodemic -characterised by an overabundance of information, including misinformation (Allen, 2021;Chan et al, 2022;Charbonneau & Vardell, 2022;Epstein, 2022;Morgan-Daniel et al, 2020;Naeem et al, 2021;.…”

“…Additionally, four articles highlighted training initiatives within health libraries, focusing on educating individuals to search for and identify quality information while discerning fake news (Chan et al, 2022;Herrero-Diz & Lopez-Rufino, 2021;Kim et al, 2011;Naeem & Bhatti, 2020). One article proposed leveraging reference services to assist patrons in developing skills to evaluate information resources (Charbonneau & Vardell, 2022).…”

“…Three papers identified a role for librarians in advocacy. This involvement extended to advocating for legislative changes concerning abortion (Barr-Walker et al, 2021) or transparency in artificial intelligence (Herrero-Diz & Lopez-Rufino, 2021), as well as serving as general advocates for their community (Bianchini et al, 2019).…”

Thriving in the post-Covid-19 era: a new normality for libraries' service offering

“…More specifically, we assessed whether libraries: (1) improved their social networking activities to enact new ways of interaction with their audience (Chu and Du, 2013); (2) enabled users to participate in online reading groups and virtual laboratories (Ugwulebo et al. , 2022); and (3) organized online conferences, seminars and meetings with renowned authors (Herrero-Diz and López-Rufino, 2021). These dimensions were assessed as dichotomous variables, with “1” indicating their occurrence and “0” their absence.…”