The epic battle against coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories

Ball, Philip; Maxmen, Amy

doi:10.1038/d41586-020-01452-z

Cited by 215 publications

(162 citation statements)

References 4 publications

(3 reference statements)

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“…Regarding COVID-19 vaccination specifically, while the first vaccine is minimally months away from materializing, the topic has already commanded immense public attention and generated its own pool of misinformation [47] , [48] . This ranges from rumors questioning vaccine safety to more complicated narratives suggesting that future COVID-19 vaccines were created alongside the virus and that major organizations are planning to use a COVID-19 vaccination campaign for financial gain [49] , [50] . While not the sole factor in determining behavior adoption, effective communication is necessary to address these issues and build public confidence in COVID-19 vaccination [51] .…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The public’s role in COVID-19 vaccination: Human-centered recommendations to enhance pandemic vaccine awareness, access, and acceptance in the United States

Schoch-Spana

Brunson

Long

et al. 2021

Vaccine

186

168

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Highlights A thoughtful vaccination campaign is critical to ensure COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Social, behavioral, and communication science is essential to such a campaign. Meaningful messages from trusted spokespersons can crowd out misinformation. COVID-19 vaccines must be available at familiar, convenient locations that feel safe. Transparent decisions and public oversight mechanisms strengthen vaccine confidence.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The public’s role in COVID-19 vaccination: Human-centered recommendations to enhance pandemic vaccine awareness, access, and acceptance in the United States

Schoch-Spana

Brunson

Long

et al. 2021

Vaccine

186

168

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Many mentioned successful therapeutic outcomes in China and South Korea. Despite that, when high pro le individuals, such as entrepreneur Elon Musk promoted chloroquine, it attracted the attention of the mass people, which could lead to personal decision-making (Ball & Maxmen, 2020;Liu et al, 2020). That misinformation circulated rapidly before the results of a small, non-randomized French trial of the related drug hydroxychloroquine; at that time the article was in press (Gautret et al, 2020, p. 105949).…”

Section: Misinformation During Coronavirus Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That misinformation circulated rapidly before the results of a small, non-randomized French trial of the related drug hydroxychloroquine; at that time the article was in press (Gautret et al, 2020, p. 105949). Hospitals have reported poisoning cases, where individuals suffered from toxicity from chloroquine containing pills, which they intended to have for COVID-19 (Ball & Maxmen, 2020). At the beginning of July 2020, the WHO released a press note about discontinuing hydroxychloroquine.…”

Section: Misinformation During Coronavirus Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As we have mentioned above, based on the scienti c literature, to date, scientists have been utilizing surveillance systems for infodemia tracking and analyzing disease outbreak related fake news, misinformation, and rumor spread in online media and social platforms (Ball & Maxmen, 2020). However, there is an immediate need for a tool for notifying any user about the scandal, fake news, and misinformation, while browsing in the web search engines.…”

Section: Covid-19 Misinformation In Social Media and Machine Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

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

Shams

Apu

Rahman

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Public health-related misinformation spread rapidly in online networks, particularly, in social media during any disease outbreak. Misinformation of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) drug protocol or presentation of its treatment from untrusted sources have shown dramatic consequences on public health. Authorities are utilizing several surveillance tools to detect, and slow down the rapid misinformation spread online, still millions of misinformation are found online. However, there is no currently available tool for receiving real-time misinformation notification during online health or COVID-19 related inquiries. Our proposed novel combinational approach, where we have integrated machine learning techniques with novel search engine misinformation notifier extension (SEMiNExt), helps to understand which news or information is from unreliable sources in real-time. The extension filters the search results and shows notification beforehand; it is a new and unexplored approach to prevent the spread of misinformation. To validate the user query, SEMiNExt transfers the data to a machine learning algorithm or classifier which predicts the authenticity of the search inquiry and sends a binary decision as either true or false. The results show that the supervised learning algorithm works best when 80% of the data set have been used for training purpose. Also, 10-fold cross-validation demonstrate a maximum accuracy and F1-score of 84.3% and 84.1% respectively for the Decision Tree classifier while the K-nearest-neighbor (KNN) algorithm shows the least performance. The SEMiNExt approach has introduced the possibility to improve online health communication system by showing misinformation notifications in real-time which enables safer web-based searching while inquiring on health-related issues.

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“…As a result, the spread of false or potentially damaging news is extremely fast in small worlds like digital social networks. This propagation mechanisms reminds infectious diseases spread (Watts and Strogatz, 1998) and the term "infodemics" has been coined to refer to this potentially dangerous phenomenon (Ball and Maxmen, 2020).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%