论文标题

与其他健康主题相比

Twitter and Facebook posts about COVID-19 are less likely to spread false and low-credibility content compared to other health topics

论文作者

Broniatowski, David A., Kerchner, Daniel, Farooq, Fouzia, Huang, Xiaolei, Jamison, Amelia M., Dredze, Mark, Quinn, Sandra Crouse

论文摘要

2020年2月2日,世界卫生组织宣布了19个社交媒体“ Infodepic”,并特别注意错误信息 - 经常被理解为虚假主张。为了了解不良的范围和规模,我们在2020年3月8日至5月1日之间分析了Twitter和Facebook的5亿个帖子和Facebook的5亿个帖子。与期望相反,我们发现有关COVID-19的信息更有可能包含指向更可靠的来源的链接。此外,链接到政府资源以及具有中间信誉的新闻的消息平均比与不可授予的来源的链接更常见。这些结果表明,与其他健康主题相比,对Covid-19的错误信息的更含糊形式可能更有可能通过可靠的来源传播。此外,假设信誉是虚假内容的足够代理的假设可能会高估在线虚假内容的流行:与最不可信来源链接的帖子中只有不到25%的帖子包含错误的内容。我们的结果强调了由于在科学不确定性的环境中寻求意义而区分明显的虚假性和更模棱两可的错误形式的重要性。

On February 2, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a COVID-19 social media "infodemic", with special attention to misinformation -- frequently understood as false claims. To understand the infodemic's scope and scale, we analyzed over 500 million posts from Twitter and Facebook about COVID-19 and other health topics, between March 8 and May 1, 2020. Following prior work, we assumed URL source credibility is a proxy for false content, but we also tested this assumption. Contrary to expectations, we found that messages about COVID-19 were more likely to contain links to more credible sources. Additionally, messages linking to government sources, and to news with intermediate credibility, were shared more often, on average, than links to non-credible sources. These results suggest that more ambiguous forms of misinformation about COVID-19 may be more likely to be disseminated through credible sources when compared to other health topics. Furthermore, the assumption that credibility is an adequate proxy for false content may overestimate the prevalence of false content online: less than 25% of posts linking to the least credible sources contained false content. Our results emphasize the importance of distinguishing between explicit falsehoods and more ambiguous forms of misinformation due to the search for meaning in an environment of scientific uncertainty.

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