Emergence of knowledge communities and information centralization during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Background As COVID-19 spreads worldwide, an infodemic – i.e., an over-abundance of information, reliable or not – spreads across the physical and the digital worlds, triggering behavioral responses which cause public health concern. Methods We study 200 million interactions captured from Twitter during the early stage of the pandemic, from January to April 2020, to understand its socio-informational structure on a global scale. Findings The COVID-19 global communication network is characterized by knowledge groups, hierarchically organized in sub-groups with well-defined geo-political and ideological characteristics. Communication is mostly segregated within groups and driven by a small number of subjects: 0.1% of users account for up to 45% and 10% of activities and news shared, respectively, centralizing the information flow. Interpretation Contradicting the idea that digital social media favor active participation and co-creation of online content, our results imply that public health policy strategies to counter the effects of the infodemic must not only focus on information content, but also on the social articulation of its diffusion mechanisms, as a given community tends to be relatively impermeable to news generated by non-aligned sources.

How Official Social Media Affected the Infodemic among Adults during the First Wave of COVID-19 in China

“…Throughout the lockdowns, social media and the Internet acted as a main source of information for citizens [ 36 , 37 ], with social media use rapidly increasing during the crisis [ 38 ]. Communication during the pandemic was characterized by knowledge communities, organized into hierarchies of subgroups with clear geopolitical and ideological characteristics [ 39 ]. Citizens used social media to obtain health-related information, such as to learn about necessary control measures, disseminate the latest information about the pandemic, and listen to critical announcements [ 40 ].…”

Disentangling untruths online

“…Since the beginning of the pandemic and until the end of June 2021, 20 million pieces of content as well as 3 000 accounts, pages, and groups were removed from Facebook and Instagram for violating COVID-19 policies (Rosen, 2021 [64]).…”

The State of the Journal in the Infodemic Age

“…Both misinformation-the spread of false or misleading information-and disinformation-the tactical spread of false information to deceive or cause harm-make it harder for us to care for ourselves and to serve our institutions and our patients. 1 The scientific peer review process sits in the liminal space between researchers working individually and collectively to generate new scientific knowledge and the potential social value and goodness that such scientific knowledge can achieve. In our understanding of the production of scientific knowledge, modern science is a team enterprise: each member of the team comes with distinct and overlapping expertise, experiences, biases, and interests.…”