Challenging Times of COVID-19 Pandemic: Social Media Infodemic

Abstract

During challenging times of COVID-19 individuals were frequently sharing huge volume of information through Social Media without any validation of information. This may indicate that social media users had lack of clarity about COVID-19 pandemic, whether information was factual or accurate. In the COVID-19 pandemic, investigator posed various probe related with COVID-19 information such as information trust on COVID-19 related news or posting on Social Media, or are individuals’ reliant on social media for COVID-19 pandemic information, how they do retort to false news and misinformation and did they ever shared any information related with COVID-19 on any social media platforms. The current study finds that majority of individuals indeed relied on Facebook and Twitter concerning the COVID-19pandemic information. Moreover, the study revealed that vast majority of respondents indicated that they strongly believed information was not accurate in nature and few souls had faith on the information related with COVID-19 pandemic. Whereas, this research also indicates that during challenging time of COVID-19 pandemic, respondents strongly believed that traditional media platforms played more powerful role disseminating the accurate COVID-19 information. While this investigates also showed that respondents still employ social media as main resource of COVID-19 and users were still relaying on information which were being shared by individuals on social media platforms. The respondents strongly suggest that there showed be strong mechanism or regulation should be in place to eliminate the menace of fake news and disinformation on social media platforms. The current study’s respondents believed there should be mechanism to deploy gatekeeping tools on stopping fake news so that individuals may not share inaccurate information social media platforms without validation.