Another way I wanted to look at how social media is playing into the COVID-19 scare is through research articles that have been able to analyze social media and provide tangible results. One study in particular that was fascinating was "Assessing the risks of "infodemics" in response to COVID-19 epidemics" by Galloti et al. In this article they analyzed Twitter specifically, looking at over 100 million messages across the globe. They analyzed the outbreaks of the virus, and then measured the following reliability of news being given within the tweets. What they found was that a wave of unreliable information in tweets came first. These tweets would be misinformation such as conspiracies, expressing local food and supply shortages, or pseudo-treament routines.
After these tweets, there would be another wave where the messages had content related to the rising virus epidemic in the area. What this can suggest is that social media has a key part in demonstrating virus time-lines but also playing into it. Social media plays into the time-line because the infodemic wave can lead to people gaining irrational fears, which play into propagating and accelerating an epidemic. For instance, if the first wave expresses an upcoming supply or food shortage, it will lead to people over-buying. The people react to this and, thus, create the second wave on social media expressing epidemic concerns. However, even though this raises fears and spread of misinformation, researchers found that people eventually seek more reliable sources. This could be seen at a global level as the virus spread from country to country and cases went up. I found this to be pretty interesting but very logical since as time progresses, reliable sources continue to emerge and pushed to be seen. Interestingly enough, they saw that when verified influencers spread information, they tended to act as "antibodies" in treating the infection of misinformation. Hence, demonstrating the importance that popular social media figures have, and their duty to spread reliable news.
Assessing the risks of "infodemics" in response to COVID-19 epidemics:https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.03997.pdf
- By: Unman Toor