Abstract
Misinfodemics related to COVID-19 have negatively impacted people’s lives, with adverse health and psycho-sociopolitical outcomes. As the scientific community seeks to communicate evidence-based information regarding misplaced preventive strategies and misinformed help-seeking behaviors on global multifaceted systems, a secondary risk has emerged: the effects of misinfodemics on the public. Published articles on PubMed, EMBASE, Google Scholar and Elsevier about COVID-related misinfodemics have been considered and reviewed in this article. This review examines the mechanisms, operational structure, prevalence, predictive factors, effects, responses and potential curtailing strategies of misinfodemics of COVID-19. The present article shows that the popular variants of COVID-19 misinfodemics could be the joint product of a psychological predisposition which is either to reject information from experts or perceive the crisis situation as a product of misinfodemics mechanisms and partisan ideological motivations. The psychological foundations and political disposition of misinfodemics have implications for the development of strategies designed to curtail the negative consequences on public health.
Highlights
Misinfodemics related to COVID-19 have negatively impacted people’s lives, with adverse health and psycho-sociopolitical outcomes
Mainstream and social media have become a primary source of information for people all around the world and the risk of misinfodemics surrounding
A man took his own life after a positive diagnosis of COVID-19 (India), and people have overdosed on the drug cholorquine after the news about its effectiveness against COVID-19 proliferated (Nigeria) (Busari and Adebayo, 2020; Joe, 2020)
Summary
Mainstream and social media have become a primary source of information for people all around the world and the risk of misinfodemics surrounding. There has been a failure to make a distinction between empirically-based scientific truths and fabricated, unconfirmed anti-science conspiracy theories among the general public Such reports reduce the legitimacy of new scientific discoveries regarding a cure or vaccine for COVID-19. This can create social stigma, resulting in xenophobia, anti-Chinese sentiment, racism, marginalization, reduced compliance and adherence to quarantine and have adverse health and psychosocial impacts (Aguilera, 2020; Rana et al, 2020a, 2020b). These considerations become even more exacerbated during lockdown, leading people on the fringe of popular opinion to spend ever more time on social media. In a 2019 study (Montanaro, 2020) conducted in the US, over 90% of respondents reported trust in medical healthcare professionals, in contrast to a 2020 study, where the majority of respondents reported mistrust in information about COVID-19 from the current administration and mainstream media news outlets (New York Times, 2020)
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