Twitter and Facebook posts about COVID-19 are less likely to spread misinformation compared to other health topics
Open accessAbstract
The COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread attention to an “infodemic” of potential health misinformation. This claim has not been assessed based on evidence. We evaluated if health misinformation became more common during the pandemic. We gathered about 325 million posts sharing URLs from Twitter and Facebook during the beginning of the pandemic (March 8-May 1, 2020) compared to the same period in 2019. We relied on source credibility as an accepted proxy for misinformation across this database. Human annotators also coded a subsample of 3000 posts with URLs for misinformation. Posts about COVID-19 were 0.37 times as likely to link to “not credible” sources and 1.13 times more likely to link to “more credible” sources than prior to the pandemic. Posts linking to “not credible” sources were 3.67 times more likely to include misinformation compared to posts from “more credible” sources. Thus, during the earliest stages of the pandemic, when claims of an infodemic emerged, social media contained proportionally less misinformation than expected based on the prior year. Our results suggest that widespread health misinformation is not unique to COVID-19. Rather, it is a systemic feature of online health communication that can adversely impact public health behaviors and must therefore be addressed.
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From The fingerprints of misinformation: how deceptive content differs from reliable sources in terms of cognitive effort and appeal to emotions (2022) · cites this paper as Broniatowski et al., 2022
The study follows a similar approach as previous studies to classify sources.
“Here, it is important to note that I follow a similar approach as previous studies to classify sources (Broniatowski et al., 2022;Cinelli et al., 2020;Cox et al., 2020;Lazer et al., 2018;Singh et al., 2020).”
From The fingerprints of misinformation: how deceptive content differs from reliable sources in terms of cognitive effort and appeal to emotions (2022) · cites this paper as Broniatowski et al., 2022
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Self-citation
- Authors
- Broniatowski, D. A., Kerchner, D., Farooq, F., Huang, X., Jamison, A. M., Dredze, M., Quinn, S. C., & Ayers, J. W.
- Affiliations
- George Washington University (US)
- University of Pittsburgh (US)
- University of Memphis (US)
- University of Maryland, College Park (US)
- Johns Hopkins University (US)
- University of California San Diego (US)
- Corresponding author
- Broniatowski, David A.
- ORCID
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2022-01-12
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- e0261768
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8754324
- OpenAlex
- W4205316473
- Cited by
- 49
- References
- 16
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 13
- FWCI
- 16.54
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Update notices
- correction (2024-02-12)
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01GM114771)
- John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (GW Institute for Data Democracy and Politics)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Communication › Communication and COVID-19 Impact
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Keywords
- COVID-19 pandemic, health misinformation, infodemic, social media, Twitter, Facebook, source credibility, online health communication
- MeSH terms
- COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, Disinformation, Infodemic, Humans, Public Health, Social Media
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