Understanding the spread of COVID 19 misinformation on social media: The effects of topics and a political leaders nudge
From Digital Culture & Society
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[edit] Understanding the spread of COVID 19 misinformation on social media: The effects of topics and a political leaders nudge
Wang, X., Zhang, M., Fan, W., & Zhao, K. (2022). Understanding the spread of COVID‐19 misinformation on social media: The effects of topics and a political leader’s nudge. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 73(5), 726–737.
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24576
[edit] Context
The Wang et al article very clearly outlines the analysis of the platform Twitter, in regards to misinformation about Covid-19. It specifically looks at one platform which allows users to see Twitter specific statistics about the pandemic, such as, what kind of misinformation spreads on Twitter, and where this misinformation is coming from. It shows the outside influence of misinformative articles and stories that are being read online and in turn, brought, shared and discussed on social media platforms like Twitter. This article specifically wants to determine where the sources of disinformation are coming from on platforms like Twitter, and how many of them come from articles online that further spread disinformation. As well as the influence that the views of powerful people have on Twitter disinformation discourses, like Donald Trump.
[edit] Overview
The Wang et al article first discusses how social media became a very common place for information surrounding Covid-19 to be spread, in the height of uncertainty in the pandemic. They further look into how to detect and spot misinformation online, telling people how to spot misinformation, what causes the spread, how people process information and where this information comes from. The Wang et al article specifically looks at two factors when it comes to social media, where the misinformation is coming from, and how the effects of strong political voices like Donald Trump, further contribute to the spread of misinformation on Twitter. The data collected for this research was based on 855 websites that included misinformation about Covid-19. They then retrieved tweets about Covid-19, among the approximate 40 million tweets mentioning the pandemic, around 60,000 contain URLs that lead to 619 out of the 855 news stories from misinformation websites. Around 1000 tweets from Donald Trump were gathered, but it is to be noted that his tweets did not contain any links to articles. Through analyzing data, researchers concluded that conspiracies about Covid-19 were the most likely to spread. This data showed that misinformation on social media can be attributed to misinformative websites, and having a political nudge from powerful voices, like Donald Trump, online.
[edit] Strengths and Weaknesses
This Wang et al article's major strength was being able to identify what actually causes the spread of misinformation online (heuristic systematic model, misinformation websites, and powerful voices contributing to misinformation narratives). They also clearly identified what kind of fake news spreads the most, and the quickest, based on the data that they collected. As well as, where that misinformation source came from. Wang et al, strongly identified the role of powerful political voices on Twitter, and the effect that this had on the dissemination of disinformation on the platform.
A weakness of the Wang et al article is its generalization around the topic of Covid-19. The tweets they pulled included any keywords surrounding the pandemic, but it would be interesting to see how results might differ if one area of Covid-19 was focused on (vaccine, restrictions, remedies…etc). Since the kind of tweets they looked at were a very wide spectrum related to the pandemic, it may be that one topic faced a greater spread of disinformation than others on Twitter, so future research results on that topic would be interesting. Another weakness of this article that could be further explored is how deep the disinformation spread. They looked at the amount of retweets, but there is more to explore with how many people these tweets affect, like who is retweeting it (is it someone with millions of followers, or only a few) and how far it is spread in a social network. A final weakness of the Wang et al research is how they looked at Donald Trump as the ‘political leader’ source. However, Donald Trump is kind of a political anomaly, therefore it would be interesting to see if the same results were found if looking at a different leader.
[edit] Assessment
The Wang et al article was very clear and effective in its research regarding Covid-19 misinformation circulating on Twitter. The Wang et al article clearly depicts the amount of disinformation spread on Twitter, where the source of this disinformation is coming from and the effect of powerful voices on the spread of disinformation. There were three major findings of this article that contribute to new major research developments on the topics. One, conspiracies are the most likely kind of misinformation to be spread on Twitter. Second, Trump's communication and behaviour on Twitter was linked to the spread of misinformation on Covid-19. Third, misinformation was shared more by people of power, by those more active on Twitter, and by those that actively discussed Covid-19. Therefore, people that are looking to learn more about why, or what kind of misinformation spreads on Twitter, would benefit from looking deeper into the article.
Sb19qp 13:00, 9 December 2023 (EST)
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