Misinformation and the US Ebola communication crisis: analyzing the veracity and content of social media messages related to a fear-inducing infectious disease outbreak

Abstract

Background The Ebola communication crisis of 2014 generated widespread fear and attention among Western news media, social media users, and members of the United States (US) public. Health communicators need more information on misinformation and the social media environment during a fear-inducing disease outbreak to improve communication practices. The purpose of this study was to describe the content of Ebola-related tweets with a specific focus on misinformation, political content, health related content, risk framing, and rumors. Methods We examined tweets from a random 1% sample of all tweets published September 30th - October 30th, 2014, filtered for English-language tweets mentioning “Ebola” in the content or hashtag, that had at least 1 retweet (N = 72,775 tweets). A randomly selected subset of 3639 (5%) tweets were evaluated for inclusion. We analyzed the 3113 tweets that meet inclusion criteria using public health trained human coders to assess tweet characteristics (joke, opinion, discord), veracity (true, false, partially false), political context, risk frame, health context, Ebola specific messages, and rumors. We assessed the proportion of tweets with specific content using descriptive statistics and chi-squared tests. Results Of non-joke tweets, 10% of Ebola-related tweets contained false or partially false information. Twenty-five percent were related to politics, 28% contained content that provoked reader response or promoted discord, 42% contained risk elevating messages and 72% were related to health. The most frequent rumor mentioned focused on government conspiracy. When comparing tweets with true information to tweets with misinformation, a greater percentage of tweets with misinformation were political in nature (36% vs 15%) and contained discord-inducing statements (45% vs 10%). Discord-inducing statements and political messages were both significantly more common in tweets containing misinformation compared with those without(p < 0.001). Conclusions Results highlight the importance of anticipating politicization of disease outbreaks, and the need for policy makers and social media companies to build partnerships and develop response frameworks in advance of an event. While each public health event is different, our findings provide insight into the possible social media environment during a future epidemic and could help optimize potential public health communication strategies.

Social media as a tool for scientific updating at the time of COVID pandemic: Results from a national survey in Italy

“…Similar results were described for other pandemics, such as for 2009 H1N1 [17] and 2014 Ebola outbreaks. Interestingly, data from the Ebola crisis showed that statements that were political in nature were particularly at risk to spread misinformation [18]. However, to our knowledge, few studies have explored the role of information dissemination through social media on clinicians and other healthcare professionals.…”

“…This, on one hand, is coherent with the purpose of social media themselves but, on the other hand, it entails a broader shift in how professionals conceive the access to medical information, technological advances and scientific knowledge. We believe that it is important to acknowledge this phenomenon, as well as the risk of spreading misinformation, fear or research exceptionalism, with potentially dangerous consequences for public health [ 5 , 12 , 13 , 18 ].…”

“…risk of spreading misinformation, fear or research exceptionalism, with potentially dangerous consequences for public health [5,12,13,18]. We strongly suggest that, during a pandemic, academic journals implement dedicated sections for rapid communications in the form of Forum sections, Rapid responses or Comments, and reserve peer reviewing for key points as needed [19,20], in accordance to the cited WHO protocol for data sharing during public health emergencies [6].…”

Is the press properly presenting the epidemiological data on COVID-19? An analysis of newspapers from 25 countries.

“…This situation has worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, with misinformation about the origin of the disease, risk factors, use of chloroquine and ibuprofen, in addition to an unclear perception of the pandemic data [14][15][16]. Also to be considered is the increase in depression and anxiety generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbated by continued overexposure to information about the disease, which has also been evidenced in other epidemics such as Ebola virus [17][18][19][20].…”

Real-time credible online health information inquiring: a novel search engine misinformation notifier extension (SEMiNExt) during COVID-19-like disease outbreak

“…Among them, nine were veri ed to be accurate (Samaan et al, 2005). During the West African Ebola virus epidemic in 2014, there was widespread fear and attention among the United States-based users, followers of Western media, and social media platforms such as Twitter (Sell et al, 2020).…”