Social media and COVID-19 misinformation: how ignorant Facebook users are?

Md Sayeed Al-Zaman

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e07144

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed a lot of lives around the world, not only with the virus but also with misinformation. Many researchers have investigated COVID-19 misinformation, but none of them was related to social media users’ diverse responses to different types of COVID-19 misinformation, which could be a timely exploration. To bridge this gap in scholarly literature, the present study based on 11,716 comments from 876 Facebook posts on five COVID-19 misinformation seeks to answer two relevant research questions: (a) How ignorant social media users are about misinformation? (b) How do they react to different types of misinformation? Following a quantitative content analysis method, this study produces a few novel findings. The results show that most of the users trust misinformation (60.88%), and fewer can deny (16.15%) or doubt (13.30%) the claims based on proper reasons. The acceptance of religious misinformation (94.72%) surpassed other types of misinformation. Most of the users react happily (34.50%) to misinformation: the users who accept misinformation are mostly happy (55.02%) because it may satisfy their expectations, and the users who distrust misinformation are mostly angry (44.05%) presuming it may cause harm to people. The chi-square and phi coefficient values show strong positive and significant associations between the themes, levels of ignorance, and reactions to misinformation. Some strengths, limitations, and ethical concerns of this study have also been discussed.

Highlights

The COVID-19 pandemic is addressed as the largest scientific experiment in human history in many academic disciplines like criminology, economics, psychology, and biological sciences
Many studies have been conducted to date in the field of communication studies, psychology, and philosophy relating to the COVID-19 pandemic (Al-Zaman, 2021b; Casero-Ripolles, 2020; Cinelli et al, 2020; Laato et al, 2020; Naeem and Bhatti, 2020; Pennycook et al, 2020; Rovetta and Bhagavathula, 2020), none of them explored how social media users respond to different types of COVID-19 misinformation, and what their emotional expressions are when they interact with such misinformation
They might have a lack of information literacy, which prevents them from identifying the real nature of the misinformation they encounter on Facebook

Summary

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is addressed as the largest scientific experiment in human history in many academic disciplines like criminology, economics, psychology, and biological sciences. In many countries around the world, consumption of digital media, such as social media, has increased by 65–75% (Casero-Ripolles, 2020; Keelery, 2020) On such a backdrop, what harm the internet with a huge flow of misinformation could cause can be predictable. Philosophers around the world are concerned about these inquiries and try to resolve such epistemic complexities on an acceptable ground, but little success has been achieved so far. It is still a contesting idea whether information has to be true or not. What about misinformation? How should the relationship between misinformation and knowledge/ignorance be explained? Such questions are tried to be explained along with other important concepts based on the previous literature

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion