Media biases and decision-making at the
social
level
It is a common trend for using social and news media to track disease
outbreaks. In particular, at the beginning of an outbreak, people have a
dominant tendency to pick up the information from informal media rather
than official sources since the data released by the official sources
might be delayed by a few weeks. When official sources start covering
outbreak news, the primary interest of people might shift to the
information coming from official sources, while continuing to use
informal media as alternative sources of data. Overall, informal media,
as well as official sources complementarily, contribute to the
community’s understanding of the epidemiology of an emerging outbreak.
During the COVID-19 outbreak, there has been an increasing interest in
publishing posts on social media. By using the data available in these
social environments, the exponential growth rate of COVID-10 could be
estimated to fall within the range of 1.42 to 2.64 8.
The rate is comparable to that reported by published articles for the
same duration 9, implying the reliability of data
gathered from social media. However, unreliable posts published in
social media are an issue of rising concern, because, whereas the number
of unreliable posts is less than that of reliable posts published in the
social media, the number of reactions to unreliable posts is much more
than that to reliable posts. During the COVID-19 outbreak, Twitter has
appeared as a neutral social media 10, YouTube, and
Reddit as the media of cutting unreliable data and Gab as the one of
amplifying unreliable posts 8.
The engagement in social media was most pronounced on January 20, 2020,
when the world health organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus
as a pandemic species – spreading as quickly as more than four million
cases being affected in only four months. Consequently, the COVID-19
became the subject of an infodemic – referred to as the circulation of
misinformation about the disease 8. Effects of this
infodemic – which is mostly formed by informal media – on the people’s
perception have been extended to the behavior and action of people
leading to a further worsening of the COVID-19 outbreak. To exemplify,
CNN, on March 8, 2020, announced that Italy would impose a lockdown in
the northern region. Therefore, a substantial portion of the northern
population decided to travel to the southern region. It caused
overcrowding in trains and airports, and since then, Italy increasingly
encountered the new cases of COVID-19 for two weeks.
Now unreliable posts have the power to affect people’s perception
disproportionally; it is necessary to avoid the sharing of these posts
in the first place. Studies show that the diffusion of unreliable posts
concerning the COVID-19 outbreak is largely due to non-thinking, and the
force should be primarily directed to those who share the posts.
Analytical thinking is an effective intervention for the problem. In the
study 11, when people simply received a reminder to
analyze the issue and judge the accuracy of the claim, they were more
likely to indeed discriminate between true and false content on
COVID-19.