Background An infodemic is an overflow of information of varying quality that surges across digital and physical environments during an acute public health event. It leads to confusion, risk-taking, and behaviors that can harm health and lead to erosion of trust in health authorities and public health responses. Owing to the global scale and high stakes of the health emergency, responding to the infodemic related to the pandemic is particularly urgent. Building on diverse research disciplines and expanding the discipline of infodemiology, more evidence-based interventions are needed to design infodemic management interventions and tools and implement them by health emergency responders. Objective The World Health Organization organized the first global infodemiology conference, entirely online, during June and July 2020, with a follow-up process from August to October 2020, to review current multidisciplinary evidence, interventions, and practices that can be applied to the COVID-19 infodemic response. This resulted in the creation of a public health research agenda for managing infodemics. Methods As part of the conference, a structured expert judgment synthesis method was used to formulate a public health research agenda. A total of 110 participants represented diverse scientific disciplines from over 35 countries and global public health implementing partners. The conference used a laddered discussion sprint methodology by rotating participant teams, and a managed follow-up process was used to assemble a research agenda based on the discussion and structured expert feedback. This resulted in a five-workstream frame of the research agenda for infodemic management and 166 suggested research questions. The participants then ranked the questions for feasibility and expected public health impact. The expert consensus was summarized in a public health research agenda that included a list of priority research questions. Results The public health research agenda for infodemic management has five workstreams: (1) measuring and continuously monitoring the impact of infodemics during health emergencies; (2) detecting signals and understanding the spread and risk of infodemics; (3) responding and deploying interventions that mitigate and protect against infodemics and their harmful effects; (4) evaluating infodemic interventions and strengthening the resilience of individuals and communities to infodemics; and (5) promoting the development, adaptation, and application of interventions and toolkits for infodemic management. Each workstream identifies research questions and highlights 49 high priority research questions. Conclusions Public health authorities need to develop, validate, implement, and adapt tools and interventions for managing infodemics in acute public health events in ways that are appropriate for their countries and contexts. Infodemiology provides a scientific foundation to make this possible. This research agenda proposes a structured framework for targeted investment for the scientific community, policy makers, implementing organizations, and other stakeholders to consider.
The Paper explores the problem of fake news and disinformation campaigns in the turmoil era of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. The Author addresses the problem from the perspective of Crime Science, identifying the actual and potential impact of fake news propagation on both the social fabric and the work of the law-enforcement and security services. The Author covers various vectors of disinformation campaigns and offers the overview of challenges associated with the use of deep fakes and the abuse of Artificial Intelligence, Machine-, Deep- and Reinforcement-Learning technologies. The Paper provides the outline of preventive strategies that might be used to mitigate the consequences of fake news proliferation, including the introduction of counter-narratives and the use of AI as countermeasure available to the law-enforcement and public safety agencies. The Author also highlights other threats and forms of crime leveraging the pandemic crisis. As the Paper deals with the current and rapidly evolving phenomenon, it is based on qualitative research and uses the most up-to-date, reliable open-source information, including the Web-based material.
The article explores the concept of infodemics during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the propagation of false or inaccurate information proliferating worldwide throughout the SARS-CoV-2 health crisis. We provide an overview of disinformation, misinformation and malinformation and discuss the notion of “fake news”, and highlight the threats these phenomena bear for health policies and national and international security. We discuss the mis-/disinformation as a significant challenge to the public health, intelligence, and policymaking communities and highlight the necessity to design measures enabling the prevention, interdiction, and mitigation of such threats. We then present an overview of selected opportunities for applying technology to study and combat disinformation, outlining several approaches currently being used to understand, describe, and model the phenomena of misinformation and disinformation. We focus specifically on complex networks, machine learning, data- and text-mining methods in misinformation detection, sentiment analysis, and agent-based models of misinformation spreading and the detection of misinformation sources in the network. We conclude with the set of recommendations supporting the World Health Organization’s initiative on infodemiology. We support the implementation of integrated preventive procedures and internationalization of infodemic management. We also endorse the application of the cross-disciplinary methodology of Crime Science discipline, supplemented by Big Data analysis and related information technologies to prevent, disrupt, and detect mis- and disinformation efficiently.
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