Analysing Misinformation Sharing Amongst College Students in India During COVID-19

Abstract

Over the last few years, social media has been increasingly used to share excessive amounts of information daily. With the growth of information sharing, unverified or false information (also termed as misinformation) is also being shared, which relates to shared information's quality and effects. Moreover, with the current scenario of social distancing measures and lock downs, social media has gained a lot of mo-mentum amongst the student community in India. College students more actively use social media to exchange information in comparison to others. This study aims to find the reasons of misinformation sharing over social media and investigate the factors that lead to differences in motivations behind misinformation sharing among college students. The findings presented in this study have yet not been reported anywhere in the literature. For this purpose, a well designed Google Form ques-tionnaire containing various questions about demography, motivations, information characteristics and post-pandemic effects of misinformation sharing was distributed among students of various colleges to collect the data. A misinformation sharing index (MSI) is created and utilised in the analysis to find relationships with some selected variables. Results reveal that about 62.4friends somehow share misinformation over social media. The main motivations of sharing misinformation are found to be related to self-expression, information char-acteristics and socialising. The students who spend more time on social media, i.e., social media usage more than 12 times per day, always share misinformation on so-cial media. While the extent of verification and accuracy of information is not ranked higher, male students share or intend to share misinformation more than their counterparts, whereas female students admitted that their friends share relatively higher misinformation than male respondents. The educational differential is also apparent with undergraduate students involved in sharing a greater extent of misinformation, and undergraduate males are more active in misinformation sharing than females. During COVID-19, the amount of misinformation sharing has increased rapidly. Misinformation related to COVID-19 leads people to do unnecessary practices and changes in their lifestyles and affects their mental health and behaviour.