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This research examines the content, timing, and spread of COVID-19 misinformation and subsequent debunking efforts for two COVID-19 myths. COVID-19 misinformation tweets included more non-specific authority references (e.g., “Taiwanese experts”, “a doctor friend”), while debunking tweets included more specific and verifiable authority references (e.g.,

During the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis, citizens have been attempting to obtain critical information and directives from official government websites. These are usually hosted on top-level domains, such as coronavirus.mx. There is no reliable mechanism to verify these websites’ authenticity, and the space is also shared by commercial entities selling related (or not) products and advertisements.

WhatsApp was alleged to have been widely used to spread misinformation and propaganda during the 2018 elections in Brazil and the 2019 elections in India. Due to the private encrypted nature of the messages on WhatsApp, it is hard to track the dissemination of misinformation at scale.

We investigate the diffusion of conspiracy theories related to the origin of COVID-19 on social media. By analyzing third-party content on four social media platforms, we show that: (a) In contrast to conventional wisdom, mainstream sources contribute overall more to conspiracy theories diffusion than alternative and other sources; and (b) platforms’ content moderation practices are able to mitigate the spread of conspiracy theories.

News feeds in virtually all social media platforms include engagement metrics, such as the number of times each post is liked and shared. We find that exposure to these signals increases the vulnerability of users to low-credibility information in a simulated social media feed.

This paper is a qualitative ethnographic study of how a group of meme factories in Singapore and Malaysia have adapted their content programming and social media practices in light of COVID-19. It considers how they have fostered, countered, or challenged the rise and spread of misinformation in both countries.

WhatsApp is a key medium for the spread of news and rumors, often shared as images. We study a large collection of politically-oriented WhatsApp groups in India, focusing on the period leading up to the 2019 Indian national elections. By labeling samples of random and popular images, we find that around 10% of shared images are known misinformation and most fall into three types of images.

We follow the trajectory of the unverified story about the adverse effects of using Ibuprofen for treating the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on Twitter, across five European countries. Our findings suggest that the impact of misinformation1We use the term misinformation to refer to false or inaccurate information that is shared accidentally.

We investigate the relationship between media consumption, misinformation, and important attitudes and behaviours during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We find that comparatively more misinformation circulates on Twitter, while news media tends to reinforce public health recommendations like social distancing. We find that exposure to social media is associated with misperceptions regarding basic facts about COVID-19 while the inverse is true for news media.

An experiment conducted with 610 participants suggests that corrections to misinformation—pointing out information that is wrong or misleading and offering credible information in its place—on social media reduce misperceptions regardless of the correction’s tone (uncivil, affirmational, or neutral). There is also an opportunity to correct secondary but related misperceptions (dealing with the same topic but with a different specific fact) when responding to misinformation on social media.