Infodemic Exposure and People’s Reliance on COVID-19 Information
Sources: Cross-sectional study in ten countries
Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between the reliance on different
information sources and infodemic exposure in the early phases of the
pandemic. The aim is to identify the sources that create less infodemic.
We analyze high-quality secondary data from two studies using a
10-country sample: the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy,
Japan, South Africa, and South Korea. Study 1 analyzes infodemic
exposure through an analysis of 3,723,920 COVID-19 tweets. Likewise,
study 2 analyzes reliance on COVID-19 information sources by surveying
10,000 respondents. This research provides perspectives and implications
for the infodemic debunking to the government departments, public health
organizations, and media industries by analyzing the correlations
between these two studies. We found that people who rely on national
government information sources about COVID-19 tend to be less exposed to
the infodemic. Findings also suggest a correlation between the countries
with higher COVID-19 confirmed cases and people’s reliance on the
national government information sources. We found that people from
countries with more unverified bots tweeting about COVID-19 tend to rely
less on family and friends and social media as sources. Evidence also
suggests that the most trusted spokespeople are scientists and health
professionals rather than politicians. Finally, we observed 70% of the
sample´s countries slightly reduced their risk of exposure to the
infodemic within 12 months of the pandemic’s start.