Abstract
Background: During global health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, rapid spread of misinformation on social media has occurred. The misinformation associated with COVID-19 has been analyzed, but little attention has been paid to developing a comprehensive analytical framework to study its spread on social media.
Objective: We propose an elaboration likelihood model-based theoretical model to understand the persuasion process of COVID-19-related misinformation on social media.
Methods: The proposed model incorporates the central route feature (content feature) and peripheral features (including creator authority, social proof, and emotion). The central-level COVID-19-related misinformation feature includes five topics: medical information, social issues and people’s livelihoods, government response, epidemic spread, and international issues. First, we created a data set of COVID-19 pandemic-related misinformation based on fact-checking sources and a data set of posts that contained this misinformation on real-world social media. Based on the collected posts, we analyzed the dissemination patterns.
Results: Our data set included 11,450 misinformation posts, with medical misinformation as the largest category (n=5359, 46.80%). Moreover, the results suggest that both the least (4660/11,301, 41.24%) and most (2320/11,301, 20.53%) active users are prone to sharing misinformation. Further, posts related to international topics that have the greatest chance of producing a profound and lasting impact on social media exhibited the highest distribution depth (maximum depth=14) and width (maximum width=2355). Additionally, 97.00% (2364/2437) of the spread was characterized by radiation dissemination.
Conclusions: Our proposed model and findings could help to combat the spread of misinformation by detecting suspicious users and identifying propagation characteristics.
Keywords: COVID-19; epidemic; global health crisis; health misinformation; infodemiology; medical information; misinformation; misinformation spread; pandemic; social media; theoretical model.
【저자키워드】 COVID-19, pandemic, social media, Epidemic, misinformation, infodemiology, global health crisis, health misinformation, medical information, misinformation spread, theoretical model., 【초록키워드】 social media, COVID-19 pandemic, media, Health crisis, Spread, Health, Characteristics, International, emotion, misinformation, dissemination, distribution, information, data set, Government, Radiation, help, width, FIVE, feature, likelihood, highest, analyzed, collected, occurred, include, exhibited, characterized, producing, with COVID-19, 【제목키워드】 understanding, network,