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Inoculating Against Fake News About COVID-19
Open accessAbstract
The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been accompanied by a large amount of misleading and false information about the virus, especially on social media. In this article, we explore the coronavirus “infodemic” and how behavioral scientists may seek to address this problem. We detail the scope of the problem and discuss the negative influence that COVID-19 misinformation can have on the widespread adoption of health protective behaviors in the population. In response, we explore how insights from the behavioral sciences can be leveraged to manage an effective societal response to curb the spread of misinformation about the virus. In particular, we discuss the theory of psychological inoculation (or prebunking) as an efficient vehicle for conferring large-scale psychological resistance against fake news.
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“46% of people in the UK and 48% of people in the United States were exposed to false information.”
From The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic (2022) · cites this paper as [242]
In the citing paper
“All countries proved to be highly vulnerable to disinformation and misinformation regarding the pandemic”
From The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic (2022) · cites this paper as [242]
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The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic
Sachs, J. D., Karim, S. S. A., Aknin, L., Allen, J., Brosbøl, K., Colombo, F., Barron, G. C., Espinosa, M. F., Gaspar, V., Gaviria, A., et al. (2022) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(22)01585-9 · Cited by 842
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“Simultaneously, the vaccines based on modern technologies, such as messenger RNA platform or recombinant viral vectors, can be easily targeted to trigger public fear, especially considering that there has already been a flood of scientifically unsupported claims about COVID-19 casting doubts on health-protective-behav…”
Background(Why) Is Misinformation a Problem?
Adams, Z., Osman, M., Bechlivanidis, C., & Meder, B. (2023) · Perspectives on Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/17456916221141344 · Cited by 182
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Tay, L. Q., Hurlstone, M. J., Kurz, T., & Ecker, U. K. H. (2021) · British Journal of Psychology · doi:10.1111/bjop.12551 · Cited by 114
Ethical implications of text generation in the age of artificial intelligence
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Farhangian, F., Cruz, R. M. O., & Cavalcanti, G. D. C. (2023) · Information Fusion · doi:10.1016/j.inffus.2023.102140 · Cited by 91
How Can Psychological Science Help Counter the Spread of Fake News?
van der Linden, S., Roozenbeek, J., Maertens, R., Basol, M., Kácha, O., Rathje, S., & Traberg, C. S. (2021) · The Spanish Journal of Psychology · doi:10.1017/sjp.2021.23 · Cited by 71
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Amazeen, M. A., Krishna, A., & Eschmann, R. (2022) · Science Communication · doi:10.1177/10755470221111558 · Cited by 69
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“…exposed to them is notoriously hard, presenting people with reliable information that can counteract the effect of subsequently encountered misinformation is believed to be an effective strategy for dealing with various, including COVID-19 related, misinformation (van der Linden et al., 2020).”
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Hesitancy towards COVID-19 Vaccines: An Analytical Cross–Sectional Study
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A link2vec-based fake news detection model using web search results
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Rumors in Retweet: Ideological Asymmetry in the Failure to Correct Misinformation
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“This work focuses on the spread of rumors to address a growing interest in, and need to understand, the psychology of misinformation (Pennycook & Rand, 2021; Van Der Linden et al., 2020; Lazer et al., 2017).”
BackgroundAI-driven disinformation: policy recommendations for democratic resilience
Romanishyn, A., Malytska, O., & Goncharuk, V. (2025) · Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.3389/frai.2025.1569115 · Cited by 47
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“This warning is intended to trigger a feeling of threat and increase the receiver’s motivation to resist the maleficent attempt (van der Linden et al., 2020).”
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Huang, K.-H., McKeown, K. R., Nakov, P., Choi, Y., & Ji, H. (2023) · Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.815 · Cited by 68
Faking Fake News for Real Fake News Detection: Propaganda-loaded Training Data Generation
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“In particular, human-written disin-formation 2 is often used to manipulate certain populations and had a catastrophic impact on multiple events, such as Brexit (Bastos and Mercea, 2019), the COVID-19 pandemic (van Der Linden et al., 2020), and the 2022 Russian assault on Ukraine.”
BackgroundStudy on the Refusal of Vaccination against COVID-19 in Romania
Marcau, F., Purec, S., & Niculescu, G. (2022) · Vaccines · doi:10.3390/vaccines10020261 · Cited by 44
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“That means, citizens are facing an additional challenge to separate true from false information, which can cause confusions and fears of being manipulated (van der Linden et al., 2020).”
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The (Mis)Information Game: A social media simulator
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“(Basol et al., 2021), and Cranky Uncle (Cook et al., 2022) teach players common techniques for promoting misinformation in the hope that this has an inoculating effect (van der Linden et al., 2020).”
BackgroundSARS-CoV-2 Vaccination Hesitancy and Behaviors in a National Sample of People Living with HIV
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“More realistic models and improved experimental designs can inspire future behavioral interventions in the fight against misinformation and conspiracy theories, by cultivating the capacity for analytic, critical and scientific thinking (van der Linden et al., 2020; Lewandowsky et al., 2021).”
BackgroundAI and Blockchain Empowered Metaverse for Web 3.0: Vision, Architecture, and Future Directions
Zhang, X., Min, G., Li, T., Ma, Z., Cao, X., & Wang, S. (2023) · IEEE Communications Magazine · doi:10.1109/mcom.004.2200473 · Cited by 45
“, injection of bleach can protect you against the COVID19 virus [3]), which makes it tougher for users to obtain”
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“Regarding COVID-19 infections and vaccines, misleading information and misinformation are spread in various media, especially social media.(36) Previous studies conducted in Western countries reported that susceptibility to misinformation is associated with a lower likelihood of getting vaccinated for COVID-19.”
BackgroundUnderstanding Vaccine Hesitancy: Insights and Improvement Strategies Drawn from a Multi-Study Review
Brumbaugh, K., Gellert, F. R., & Mokdad, A. H. (2025) · Vaccines · doi:10.3390/vaccines13101003 · Cited by 55
Who Believes in Fake News? Identification of Political (A)Symmetries
Baptista, J. P., & Gradim, A. (2022) · Social Sciences · doi:10.3390/socsci11100460 · Cited by 53
“However, despite the motivated political reasoning affecting both in relation to the use of the term “fake news”, the conservative audience is more likely to label the leftist or liberal media (e.g., CNN) as fake news, than liberals are to label the media associated with conservatives (e.g., Fox News) (van der Linden…”
BackgroundInfluentialAn Empirical Study of the Impact of Systems Thinking and Simulation on Sustainability Education
Green, C., Molloy, O., & Duggan, J. (2021) · Sustainability · doi:10.3390/su14010394 · Cited by 39
XFlag: Explainable Fake News Detection Model on Social Media
Chien, S.-Y. J., Yang, C., & Yu, F. (2022) · International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1080/10447318.2022.2062113 · Cited by 42
“If these fake reports had been better regulated, the outbreak might have had a different outcome (van Der Linden et al., 2020).”
BackgroundTan, W.-K., & Hsu, C. Y. (2022) · Online Information Review · doi:10.1108/oir-08-2021-0448 · Cited by 38
Oleksy, T., Wnuk, A., Gambin, M., Łyś, A., Bargiel-Matusiewicz, K., & Pisuła, E. (2022) · Personality and Individual Differences · doi:10.1016/j.paid.2022.111524 · Cited by 30
Mining User-aware Multi-relations for Fake News Detection in Large Scale Online Social Networks
Su, X., Yang, J. Y., Wu, J. X., & Zhang, Y. (2023) · ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) · doi:10.1145/3539597.3570478 · Cited by 37
Caserotti, M., Gavaruzzi, T., Girardi, P., Tasso, A., Buizza, C., Candini, V., Zarbo, C., Chiarotti, F., Brescianini, S., Calamandrei, G., et al. (2021) · Preventive Medicine · doi:10.1016/j.ypmed.2021.106885 · Cited by 38
Understanding Anti-COVID-19 Vaccination Protest Slogans in the US
Liao, T. F. (2022) · Frontiers in Communication · doi:10.3389/fcomm.2022.941872 · Cited by 36
Moralization and Mismoralization in Public Health
Kraaijeveld, S. R., & Jamrozik, E. (2022) · Medicine Health Care and Philosophy · doi:10.1007/s11019-022-10103-1 · Cited by 37
Deep transfer learning for COVID ‐19 fake news detection in Persian
Ghayoomi, M., & Mousavian, M. (2022) · Expert Systems · doi:10.1111/exsy.13008 · Cited by 40
“…Munich Security Conference on 15 February 2020 proclaimed that ‘ We're not just fighting an epidemic; we're fighting an infodemic ’ (Zarocostas, 2020). van der Linden et al. (2020) have specified some published fake news about the epidemic, including marketing for counterfeit treatments such as…”
BackgroundHealth misinformation: what it is, why people believe it, how to counter it
Nan, X., Thier, K., & Wang, Y. (2023) · Annals of the International Communication Association · doi:10.1080/23808985.2023.2225489 · Cited by 42
“…work well to decrease susceptibility to health misinformation (Vraga et al., 2022a, 2022b), more engaging interventions such as literacy games (i.e. pre-bunking) can signi fi cantly boost individuals ’ defenses against misinformation (Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2019; van der Linden et al., 2020).”
BackgroundChen, E., Jiang, J., Chang, H.-C. H., Murić, G., & Ferrara, E. (2021) · JMIR Infodemiology · doi:10.2196/32378 · Cited by 38
“Efforts are being made to combat misinformation, including identifying intervention points in social networks to mitigate misinformation [7], teaching the community how to identify misinformation [6], rating source reliability [8], and using both crowdsourced and official fact checkers to identify misinformation [9,10…”
The Impact of SARS-CoV-2 Infection on Youth Mental Health: A Narrative Review
Brasso, C., Bellino, S., Blua, C., Bozzatello, P., & Rocca, P. (2022) · Biomedicines · doi:10.3390/biomedicines10040772 · Cited by 39
Musi, E., Carmi, E., Reed, C., Yates, S., & O’Halloran, K. (2023) · Social Media + Society · doi:10.1177/20563051221150407 · Cited by 34
Emergence of knowledge communities and information centralization during the COVID-19 pandemic
Sacco, P. L., Gallotti, R., Pilati, F., Castaldo, N., & Domenico, M. D. (2021) · Social Science & Medicine · doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114215 · Cited by 35
“However, there is increasing scientific consensus over the viability of targeted information inoculation strategies as a means for creating large scale psychological resistance against fake news (van der Linden et al., 2020) as a form of ‘pre-bunking ’ rather than debunking.”
Fake news about the COVID-19 pandemic: perception of health professionals and their families
Barreto, M. D. S., Caram, C. D. S., dos Santos, J. L. G., de Souza, R. R., Góes, H. L. D. F., & Marcon, S. S. (2021) · Revista da Escola de Enfermagem da USP · doi:10.1590/1980-220x-reeusp-2021-0007 · Cited by 32
“In addition, psychological inoculation has been a strategy to prevent the damage caused by fake news(22,27).”
BackgroundOliveira, F. B., Haque, A., Mougouei, D., Evans, S., Sichman, J. S., & Singh, M. P. (2022) · IEEE Access · doi:10.1109/access.2022.3150329 · Cited by 35
Vaccine hesitancy, misinformation in the era of Covid-19: Lessons from the past
Orsini, D., Bianucci, R., Galassi, F. M., Lippi, D., & Martini, M. (2022) · Ethics Medicine and Public Health · doi:10.1016/j.jemep.2022.100812 · Cited by 32
Pilditch, T. D., Roozenbeek, J., Madsen, J. K., & van der Linden, S. (2022) · Royal Society Open Science · doi:10.1098/rsos.211953 · Cited by 46
“However, while the principle of cognitive inoculation has been shown to be effective at conferring psychological resistance against misinformation at the individual level, for example in the context of COVID-19 [13], political disinformation [14] and climate change [15], a crucial open question with significant theore…”
BackgroundSelf-citationMaertens, R., Götz, F. M., Golino, H. F., Roozenbeek, J., Schneider, C. R., Kyrychenko, Y., Kerr, J. R., Stieger, S., McClanahan, W. P., III, Drabot, K., et al. (2021) · doi:10.31234/osf.io/gk68h · Cited by 31
Self-citationA Systematic Literature Review on Fake News in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Can AI Propose a Solution?
Ahmad, T., Lazarte, E. A. A., & Mirjalili, S. (2022) · Applied Sciences · doi:10.3390/app122412727 · Cited by 32
Zhuo, J., & Harrigan, N. (2023) · Public Health · doi:10.1016/j.puhe.2023.06.016 · Cited by 30
Sun, J., & Pan, W. (2024) · Health Communication · doi:10.1080/10410236.2024.2346674 · Cited by 29
“…a number of solutions have been proposed, including long-term oriented media literacy and health literacy education programs (e.g., Lee & Ramazan, 2021; Moretti et al., 2023), and short-term oriented inoculation (e.g., Van der Linden et al., 2020) or post-correction (e.g., Tully et al., 2020).”
Xue, X., Ma, H., Zhao, Y. C., Zhu, Q., & Song, S. (2024) · Social Science & Medicine · doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117136 · Cited by 31
Can shared decision making address COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy?
Durand, M., Scalia, P., & Elwyn, G. J. (2021) · BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine · doi:10.1136/bmjebm-2021-111695 · Cited by 29
Nowak, B. M., Miedziarek, C., Pełczyński, S., & Rzymski, P. (2021) · International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health · doi:10.3390/ijerph182212266 · Cited by 30
Gwenzi, W., Skirmuntt, E. C., Musvuugwa, T., Teta, C., Halabowski, D., & Rzymski, P. (2022) · International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction · doi:10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.103350 · Cited by 33
Fake news on Facebook and their impact on supply chain disruption during COVID-19
Hossain, M. A., Chowdhury, M. M. H., Pappas, I. O., Metri, B. A., Hughes, L., & Dwivedi, Y. K. (2022) · Annals of Operations Research · doi:10.1007/s10479-022-05124-1 · Cited by 28
“SM fake news has severe adverse effects including misconstrued understandings of the situation and downplay factual information, creating and propagating speculations and chaos, and eventually affecting the effectiveness of containment strategies (Coleman, 2020; Nyilasy, n.d.; van Der Linden et al., 2020).”
BackgroundRaza, S. H., Yousaf, M. T., Zaman, U., Khan, S. W., Core, R. S., & Malik, A. N. (2023) · Vaccine · doi:10.1016/j.vaccine.2023.01.047 · Cited by 31
“Scientists, researchers, and pharmaceutical firms worldwide have developed coronavirus vaccines, and more than a dozen vaccines have been approved [3,4].”
Gu, C., & Feng, Y. (2021) · Science & Education · doi:10.1007/s11191-021-00261-8 · Cited by 26
“Although media literacy initiatives are typically expensive to develop, slow to roll out, and reactive rather than proactive (Linden et al., 2020), the present study provided an effective audience-centered approach to develop SIL.”
BackgroundWho falls for fake news? Psychological and clinical profiling evidence of fake news consumers
Escolà‐Gascón, Á., Dagnall, N., Denovan, A., Drinkwater, K. G., & Bosch, M. D. (2022) · Personality and Individual Differences · doi:10.1016/j.paid.2022.111893 · Cited by 34
Metadata
- Authors
- van der Linden, S., Roozenbeek, J., & Compton, J.
- Affiliations
- University of Cambridge (GB)
- Dartmouth College (US)
- Corresponding author
- van der Linden, Sander
- Venue
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2020-10-23
- Volume
- 11
- Pages
- 566790-566790
- ISSN
- 1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7644779
- OpenAlex
- W3094229442
- Cited by
- 632
- References
- 60
- Citations by year
- 2026: 70 · 2025: 71 · 2024: 127 · 2023: 120 · 2022: 143 · 2021: 98 · 2020: 3
- FWCI
- 121.73
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Frontiers in Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Apollo (University of Cambridge) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Apollo (cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Communication › Communication and COVID-19 Impact
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Keywords
- COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation, infodemic, fake news, psychological inoculation, prebunking, preventive health behavior, social media, behavioral interventions, SARS-CoV-2
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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