Measuring the Burden of Infodemics: Summary of the Methods and Results of the Fifth WHO Infodemic Management Conference.

Background: An infodemic is excess information, including false or misleading information, that spreads in digital and physical environments during a public health emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an unprecedented global infodemic that has led to confusion about the benefits of medical and public health interventions, with substantial impact on risk-taking and health-seeking behaviors, eroding trust in health authorities and compromising the effectiveness of public health responses and policies. Standardized measures are needed to quantify the harmful impacts of the infodemic in a systematic and methodologically robust manner, as well as harmonizing highly divergent approaches currently explored for this purpose. This can serve as a foundation for a systematic, evidence-based approach to monitoring, identifying, and mitigating future infodemic harms in emergency preparedness and prevention. Objective: In this paper, we summarize the Fifth World Health Organization (WHO) Infodemic Management Conference structure, proceedings, outcomes, and proposed actions seeking to identify the interdisciplinary approaches and frameworks needed to enable the measurement of the burden of infodemics. Methods: An iterative human-centered design (HCD) approach and concept mapping were used to facilitate focused discussions and allow for the generation of actionable outcomes and recommendations. The discussions included 86 participants representing diverse scientific disciplines and health authorities from 28 countries across all WHO regions, along with observers from civil society and global public health-implementing partners. A thematic map capturing the concepts matching the key contributing factors to the public health burden of infodemics was used throughout the conference to frame and contextualize discussions. Five key areas for immediate action were identified. Results: The 5 key areas for the development of metrics to assess the burden of infodemics and associated interventions included (1) developing standardized definitions and ensuring the adoption thereof; (2) improving the map of concepts influencing the burden of infodemics; (3) conducting a review of evidence, tools, and data sources; (4) setting up a technical working group; and (5) addressing immediate priorities for postpandemic recovery and resilience building. The summary report consolidated group input toward a common vocabulary with standardized terms, concepts, study designs, measures, and tools to estimate the burden of infodemics and the effectiveness of infodemic management interventions. Conclusions: Standardizing measurement is the basis for documenting the burden of infodemics on health systems and population health during emergencies. Investment is needed into the development of practical, affordable, evidence-based, and systematic methods that are legally and ethically balanced for monitoring infodemics; generating diagnostics, infodemic insights, and recommendations; and developing interventions, action-oriented guidance, policies, support options, mechanisms, and tools for infodemic managers and emergency program managers.

Social media behavior is associated with vaccine hesitancy.

Understanding how vaccine hesitancy relates to online behavior is crucial for addressing current and future disease outbreaks. We combined survey data measuring attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine with Twitter data in two studies (N 1 = 464 Twitter users, N 2 = 1,600 Twitter users) with preregistered hypotheses to examine how real-world social media behavior is associated with vaccine hesitancy in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). In Study 1, we found that following the accounts of US Republican politicians or hyper-partisan/low-quality news sites were associated with lower confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine-even when controlling for key demographics such as self-reported political ideology and education. US right-wing influencers (e.g. Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson) had followers with the lowest confidence in the vaccine. Network analysis revealed that participants who were low and high in vaccine confidence separated into two distinct communities (or "echo chambers"), and centrality in the more right-wing community was associated with vaccine hesitancy in the US, but not in the UK. In Study 2, we found that one's likelihood of not getting the vaccine was associated with retweeting and favoriting low-quality news websites on Twitter. Altogether, we show that vaccine hesitancy is associated with following, sharing, and interacting with low-quality information online, as well as centrality within a conservative-leaning online community in the US. These results illustrate the potential challenges of encouraging vaccine uptake in a polarized social media environment.

Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media.

Online misinformation continues to have adverse consequences for society. Inoculation theory has been put forward as a way to reduce susceptibility to misinformation by informing people about how they might be misinformed, but its scalability has been elusive both at a theoretical level and a practical level. We developed five short videos that inoculate people against manipulation techniques commonly used in misinformation: emotionally manipulative language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating, and ad hominem attacks. In seven preregistered studies, i.e., six randomized controlled studies (n = 6464) and an ecologically valid field study on YouTube (n = 22,632), we find that these videos improve manipulation technique recognition, boost confidence in spotting these techniques, increase people's ability to discern trustworthy from untrustworthy content, and improve the quality of their sharing decisions. These effects are robust across the political spectrum and a wide variety of covariates. We show that psychological inoculation campaigns on social media are effective at improving misinformation resilience at scale.

Inoculating Against Fake News About COVID-19.

The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been accompanied by a large amount of misleading and false information about the virus, especially on social media. In this article, we explore the coronavirus "infodemic" and how behavioral scientists may seek to address this problem. We detail the scope of the problem and discuss the negative influence that COVID-19 misinformation can have on the widespread adoption of health protective behaviors in the population. In response, we explore how insights from the behavioral sciences can be leveraged to manage an effective societal response to curb the spread of misinformation about the virus. In particular, we discuss the theory of psychological inoculation (or prebunking) as an efficient vehicle for conferring large-scale psychological resistance against fake news.

Call for papers for a Special Issue of ACP entitled: The Truth is Out There: the Psychology of Conspiracy Theories and How to Counter Them

All papers will be fully peer reviewed with publication of the full issue scheduled for later in the same year. Belief in conspiracy theories has become widespread, from COVID-19 and vaccinations to climate change and QAnon. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Applied Cognitive Psychology is the property of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

How Accurate Are Accuracy-Nudge Interventions? A Preregistered Direct Replication of Pennycook et al. (2020).

As part of the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program, the present study consisted of a two-stage replication test of a central finding by Pennycook et al. (2020), namely that asking people to think about the accuracy of a single headline improves "truth discernment" of intentions to share news headlines about COVID-19. The first stage of the replication test (n = 701) was unsuccessful (p = .67). After collecting a second round of data (additional n = 882, pooled N = 1,583), we found a small but significant interaction between treatment condition and truth discernment (uncorrected p = .017; treatment: d = 0.14, control: d = 0.10). As in the target study, perceived headline accuracy correlated with treatment impact, so that treatment-group participants were less willing to share headlines that were perceived as less accurate. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and an unreported change in the hypothesis (but not the analysis plan) from the preregistration in the original study.

Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world.

Misinformation about COVID-19 is a major threat to public health. Using five national samples from the UK (n = 1050 and n = 1150), Ireland (n = 700), the USA (n = 700), Spain (n = 700) and Mexico (n = 700), we examine predictors of belief in the most common statements about the virus that contain misinformation. We also investigate the prevalence of belief in COVID-19 misinformation across different countries and the role of belief in such misinformation in predicting relevant health behaviours. We find that while public belief in misinformation about COVID-19 is not particularly common, a substantial proportion views this type of misinformation as highly reliable in each country surveyed. In addition, a small group of participants find common factual information about the virus highly unreliable. We also find that increased susceptibility to misinformation negatively affects people's self-reported compliance with public health guidance about COVID-19, as well as people's willingness to get vaccinated against the virus and to recommend the vaccine to vulnerable friends and family. Across all countries surveyed, we find that higher trust in scientists and having higher numeracy skills were associated with lower susceptibility to coronavirus-related misinformation. Taken together, these results demonstrate a clear link between susceptibility to misinformation and both vaccine hesitancy and a reduced likelihood to comply with health guidance measures, and suggest that interventions which aim to improve critical thinking and trust in science may be a promising avenue for future research.