In a time of social distancing, social media is spreading false and misleading information about COVID-19 – By Michael A. Fuoco (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) / March 17 2020
Mixed signals from the White House, a scattershot response and uncertainty about how dire the COVID-19 pandemic will become are a dangerous brew that has made for a confused and anxious public.
And that, in turn, makes people all the more susceptible to false claims of home cures for the novel coronavirus, untrue plans for an extraordinary government response, baseless pandemic predictions and inflated reports of deaths and infections.
To make matters worse, unlike in previous health crises, social media has an unprecedented dominance and power in society worldwide, enabling the exponential spread of bad information that far too often, and sometimes dangerously, is taken as fact by scared citizens looking for safety. Exacerbating that problem is that older Americans, who are most vulnerable to contracting the disease, also appear to be more susceptible to accepting fake news as fact and sharing false or misleading information with others. A 2019 study showed fake news is more likely to be shared by older Americans on Facebook than younger counterparts
Kate Bird, an expert in “crisis informatics” — the study of how information flows during crisis events, especially on the internet and social media — at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, wrote last week that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “noted that we are not just fighting an epidemic, but what he called an infodemic.”
She said that crisis events — natural disasters, industrial accidents, terrorist attacks, and emergent pandemics — often create high uncertainty about what is happening, what to do.
“When information is uncertain and anxiety is high, the natural response for people is to try to ‘resolve’ that uncertainty and anxiety” through phone calls and social media in an effort to “make sense” of the situation.
Continue to article: https://www.post-gazette.com/news/nation/2020/03/17/In-a-time-of-social-distancing-social-media-is-spreading-false-and-misleading-information-about-COVID-19/stories/202003170093
