Are internet videos useful sources of information during global public health emergencies? A case study of YouTube videos during the 2015–16 Zika virus pandemic

Abstract

A considerable chunk of the videos were misleading. They were more popular (than informative videos) and could potentially spread misinformation. Videos from trustworthy sources like university/health organizations were scarce. Curation/authentication of health information in online video platforms (like YouTube) is necessary. We discuss means to harness them as useful source of information and highlight measures to curb dissemination of misinformation during public health emergencies.

YouTube as source of information on 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak: a cross sectional study of English and Mandarin content

“…During the Ebola outbreak in 2014, relevant You tube videos were watched millions of times 7 . Similar viewership was reported during the 2016 Zika virus epidemic 8 . Such formidable viewership makes YouTube a double-edged sword in times of disease outbreaks.…”

“…The quality of information on YouTube has been evaluated during previous epidemics and endemics. Up to 20 % of videos were reported to have misleading information about various aspects of disease during these outbreaks 8,10,11 We are not aware of any studies evaluating the role of YouTube as a source of information on 2019 -nCoV. The objectives of our study were (i) to analyze the quality of the information available on YouTube about current nCoV outbreak (ii) to compare the English language content with the information available in Chinese Mandarin henceforth mentioned as Mandarin.…”

Systematic Literature Review on the Spread of Health-related Misinformation on Social Media

“…The included articles adopted disparate theoretical approaches in conceptualizing the phenomenon, with the dominant frameworks from the fields of psychology and network science. Theories employed in psychology aimed to explain individual-level cognitive response of misinformation and rumour online (Bode and Vraga, 2018;Bora et al, 2018;Chua and Banerjee, 2018;Li and Sakamoto, 2015;Ozturk et al, 2015), whereas network theories focus on the social mechanism and patterns of misinformation spread (Bessi et al, 2015;Radzikowski et al, 2016;Schmidt et al, 2018;Sicilia et al, 2017;Wood, 2018). Further co-citation analysis on all articles that investigated the phenomenon revealed that the disciplinary landscape concentrates around general science and vaccines/infectious disease, while psychology and communication studies have less cross-citation with the science and medicine literature.…”

“…The Zika epidemic stimulated considerable activity on Twitter (Wood, 2018) and Facebook (Sharma et al, 2017), as well as spread of news items (Sommariva et al, 2018), images (Seltzer et al, 2017), and videos (Bora et al, 2018) on a range of media. Conspiracy theories directed at institutions feature frequently in these discussions.…”

“…Similarly, Ozturk et al (2015) explored how different social media settings can reduce rumour spread based on rumour psychology research. Others have referred to psychological studies around conspiracist ideation, inoculation theory and social conformity in understanding the mechanism behind health misperception on social media (Bode and Vraga, 2018;Bora et al, 2018;Li and Sakamoto, 2015). Contrastingly, the use of system or network theories are aimed at explaining the patterns of social influence, social learning, social contagion and homophily and polarization processes (Bessi et al, 2015;Radzikowski et al, 2016;Schmidt et al, 2018;Sicilia et al, 2017;Wood, 2018).…”