Awareness on Spread of Misinformation and its Effect on Public with Regard to COVID-19

COVID-19 fake news among the general population: motives, sociodemographic, attitude/behavior and impacts – a systematic review

“…Similarly, a low level of media literacy indicates most of the population investigated probably takes online (particularly social media) news at its face value, without taking its COVID-19 fake news among general population veracity into consideration. It has been widely reported that social media users tend to be attracted to catchy news headlines or clickbait, often believing the news without checking the content in its entirety (Balakrishnan et al, 2021;Ramasubramanian et al, 2020), the latter of which is attributed to a lack of awareness and media literacy, laziness or callousness (Bok et al, 2021). Therefore, respective authorities including media should play a more positive and active role to promote awareness with regards to fake news peddling and its negative consequences to the public.…”

“…Studies in countries such as Nigeria (Egielewa and Ate, 2020) and India (Ramasubramanian et al, 2020) found most of their respondents to be aware of fake news dissemination on social media, and generally believe in messages that are credible and reliable. The results, however, are in contrast with an Indonesian study that found most of their young participants have a poor understanding of COVID-19 related fake news, with many believing the virus to be a biological weapon and gargling with salt water or vinegar can kill the COVID-19 virus (Nasir et al, 2020).…”

“…Frustration was also observed with the volume of COVID-19 related news being propagated online, resulting in some individuals getting mentally disturbed due to fake news (Ramasubramanian et al, 2020). Most often fake news is disseminated for its relevance, believability and shock value; hence, such distorted and exaggerated piece of information pertaining to the virus and its consequences could result in unnecessary worry, fear, frustration and anxiety (Ramasubramanian et al, 2020).…”

“…Frustration was also observed with the volume of COVID-19 related news being propagated online, resulting in some individuals getting mentally disturbed due to fake news (Ramasubramanian et al, 2020). Most often fake news is disseminated for its relevance, believability and shock value; hence, such distorted and exaggerated piece of information pertaining to the virus and its consequences could result in unnecessary worry, fear, frustration and anxiety (Ramasubramanian et al, 2020). As a matter of fact, such adverse effect on one's mental health could also lead to the person sharing the said fake news with others, and thus widening the spread unnecessarily, as revealed in sociodemographic profiles in Section 3.3 (Lee et al, 2020;Su, 2021).…”

“…biological weapon, gargling salt water etc.) 1 (14%)Nasir et al (2020) Nudging people to think about accuracy increases truth discernment in subsequent sharing intentions 1 (14%)Pennycook et al (2020) Psychological distress (anxiety) 1 (14%)Ramasubramanian et al (2020)…”