Three contextual dimensions of information on social media: lessons learned from the COVID-19 infodemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied on social media by an explosion of information disorders such as inaccurate, misleading and irrelevant information. Countermeasures adopted thus far to curb these informational disorders have had limited success because these did not account for the diversity of informational contexts on social media, focusing instead almost exclusively on curating the factual content of user's posts. However, content-focused measures do not address the primary causes of the infodemic itself, namely the user's need to post content as a way of making sense of the situation and for gathering reactions of consensus from friends. This paper describes three types of informational context-weak epistemic, strong normative and strong emotional-which have not yet been taken into account by current measures to curb down the informational disorders. I show how these contexts are related to the infodemic and I propose measures for dealing with them for future global crisis situations.

Communication vs evidence: What hinders the outreach of science during an infodemic? A narrative review

“… 44 , 45 Also, it is known that people's behaviors on social media are subject to different biases and user-generated content is not necessarily accurate. 46 , 47 , 48 Users’ content expresses their emotional state and interpretations on the pandemic 49 , 50 ; at the same time, users seek gratification from the likes and shares they may obtain. 51 , 52 With billions of active social media users sharing all kinds of information filtered by their own perspectives and algorithms choosing what should be relevant, accurate information becomes hard to recognize.…”

COVID-19: time to flatten the infodemic curve

“…However, it should be noted that social media platforms such as the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit have taken measures for dealing with misinformation such as double-check by editors, less visibility for repeated offenders, deleting of accounts and bots, as well as adding a link to official information from WHO to distribute the updates [2]. Furthermore, the impact of COVID-19 depends on the actions of individual people.…”

“…The novel coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) is a global pandemic with 54,301,156 cases and 1,316,994 deaths worldwide up to 16 November 2020 [1]. Misinformation, which is defined as false information, shared without knowledge that it is false, and disinformation, which is fabricated information distributed with the clear intention to mislead, is commonly observed in this era [2]. In the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), stated that "we're not just fighting an epidemic; we're fighting an infodemic" [3].…”

The impact of COVID-19 on the information competences of users of business sharing groups

“…As mentioned above, COVID-19 has attracted interest of many academics. Relevant papers in information science concern the significance of information and the role of information systems (Ågerfalk et al, 2020), communication and sharing information (Adam et al, 2020;Yusof et al, 2020;Zhang & Wu, 2020), phenomena of infodemic, disinformation, and fake news (Leitner, 2020;Marin, 2020;Rodríguez et al, 2020), as well as the role of information professionals in combating these pathologies (Aleixandre-Benavent et al, 2020;Naem & Bhatti, 2020).…”