A scoping review of digital health interventions for combating COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation.

OBJECTIVE: We provide a scoping review of Digital Health Interventions (DHIs) that mitigate COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation seeding and spread. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We applied our search protocol to PubMed, PsychINFO, and Web of Science to screen 1666 articles. The 17 articles included in this paper are experimental and interventional studies that developed and tested public consumer-facing DHIs. We examined these DHIs to understand digital features, incorporation of theory, the role of healthcare professionals, end-user experience, and implementation issues. RESULTS: The majority of studies (n = 11) used social media in DHIs, but there was a lack of platform-agnostic generalizability. Only half of the studies (n = 9) specified a theory, framework, or model to guide DHIs. Nine studies involve healthcare professionals as design or implementation contributors. Only one DHI was evaluated for user perceptions and acceptance. DISCUSSION: The translation of advances in online social computing to interventions is sparse. The limited application of behavioral theory and cognitive models of reasoning has resulted in suboptimal targeting of psychosocial variables and individual factors that may drive resistance to misinformation. This affects large-scale implementation and community outreach efforts. DHIs optimized through community-engaged participatory methods that enable understanding of unique needs of vulnerable communities are urgently needed. CONCLUSIONS: We recommend community engagement and theory-guided engineering of equitable DHIs. It is important to consider the problem of misinformation and disinformation through a multilevel lens that illuminates personal, clinical, cultural, and social pathways to mitigate the negative consequences of misinformation and disinformation on human health and wellness.

Debriefing works: Successful retraction of misinformation following a fake news study.

In recent years there has been an explosion of research on misinformation, often involving experiments where participants are presented with fake news stories and subsequently debriefed. In order to avoid potential harm to participants or society, it is imperative that we establish whether debriefing procedures remove any lasting influence of misinformation. In the current study, we followed up with 1547 participants one week after they had been exposed to fake news stories about COVID-19 and then provided with a detailed debriefing. False memories and beliefs for previously-seen fake stories declined from the original study, suggesting that the debrief was effective. Moreover, the debriefing resulted in reduced false memories and beliefs for novel fake stories, suggesting a broader impact on participants' willingness to accept misinformation. Small effects of misinformation on planned health behaviours observed in the original study were also eliminated at follow-up. Our findings suggest that when a careful and thorough debriefing procedure is followed, researchers can safely and ethically conduct misinformation research on sensitive topics.

Fake news mediate the relationship between sociopolitical factors and vaccination intent in Brazil.

Vaccination hesitancy has become a central concern and is a barrier to overcoming the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis. Studies have indicated that mis/disinformation plays a role on the attitudes and behaviours towards vaccination. However, further formal statistical models are required to investigate how fake news relates to vaccination intent and how they mediate the relationship between socioeconomic/political factors and vaccination intent. We studied a sample of 500 Brazilians and found that people were mostly not susceptible to vaccine mis/disinformation. In addition, we found that their vaccination intent was high. However, suspicions that fake news could be true raised doubts over the vaccination intention. Although age and political orientation directly influenced vaccination intent, we found that the relationship between socioeconomic/political factors and vaccination intent was strongly mediated by belief in fake news. Our results raise the need to create multiple strategies to combat the dissemination and acceptance of such content.

Emergence of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases: The Perfect Storm of Hesitancy, Refusal, a Pandemic, and War.

The landscape of pediatric vaccination has changed dramatically due to changing attitudes toward immunizations and recent world events. The rise of vaccine hesitancy and refusal related to the concurrent rise of social media and anti-vaccination messages with misinformation campaigns have led to populations of children being unimmunized or under-immunized. These populations have been left vulnerable to the rapid spread of vaccine-preventable infection. Additionally, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the clinical syndrome known as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) resulted in the emergence of a worldwide pandemic. Control measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 resulted in numerous reports of children missing routine vaccines along with the stopping of many public health immunization programs. Finally, armed conflicts and war have led to large family migrations from their homelands to various countries and regions leading to increased risk for missed maternal and child immunization as well as difficulty in keeping vaccination records. [Pediatr Ann. 2022;51(11):e426-e430.].

Fake news in the age of COVID-19: evolutional and psychobiological considerations.

The COVID-19 outbreak has been accompanied by a massive infodemic: an overabundance of information, some accurate and some not. At this pandemic we have seen a large scale of fake news and misinformation, leading to anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and anti-5G protests.1 Fake news is intentionally misleading and deceptive news that is written and published with the intent to damage an entity or a person. They may contain false, misleading, imposter, manipulated or fabricated content. Much of the discourse on fake news conflates three notions, named "information disorders": (a) Misinformation: false information someone shares without knowing it's untrue, (b) Disinformation: false information that's shared with the intention to harm or mislead, and (c) Malinformation: true information that's used to harm others.2 False beliefs generally arise through the same mechanisms that establish accurate beliefs. People appear to encode all new information as if it were true and later tag the information as being either true or false. Different cognitive, social and affective factors lead people to form or endorse misinformed views. The emotional content of the information shared also affects false-belief formation. An angry mood can boost misinformation sharing, while social exclusion, which is likely to induce a negative mood, can increase susceptibility to conspiratorial content.3 As shown by the Illusory Truth Effect, repeated exposure to an article, whether real or fake, increases people's perceptions of its accuracy. In social media, falsehood seems to diffuse significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects are more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, and science. Moreover, although prior knowledge of a statement leads people to confirm the statement the next time, they see it (confirmation bias), novelty facilitates decision making since it updates our understanding of the world.4 The fitness value of accurate information seems so obvious, while self-deception seems to threaten such hard-won informational gains. Then, why has not it selected out? The American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist Robert Trivers5 suggested that although our senses have evolved to give us an exquisitely detailed perception of the outside world, as soon as that information hits our brains, it often becomes biased and distorted, usually without conscious effort. Why should this be so? For Trivers, the evolutionary origins of the human propensity for self-deception lie in the adaptive benefits of deceiving others. An animal becomes a better liar when it believes its own lies, or we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others. Deception in animals is the transmission of misinformation by one animal to another, and natural selection favors deceptive signaling when aggression either confers a great benefit to signalers or imposes a great cost to receivers.6 In humans, self-deception process may have a protective role against depression, while depression on its own may reduce mechanisms of self-deception.7, 8 Humans are biased information-seekers that prefer to receive information that confirms their values and worldviews. Maybe, this is why myths and conspiracy theories around COVID-19 and vaccines exist. We may suggest that underlined neuropsychological processes, probably based on biologically determined self- or other-deceptive mechanisms, may serve in the development, and even the conservation, of at least some of the social behaviors related to the fake news phenomenon. These mechanisms may support the human tendency for biased information-seeking, and even the evolutionary persistence of the fake news phenomenon.9 However, in cases such as of COVID-19 pandemic, the native urge to deceive ourselves and others is not without risk. Beliefs in COVID-19-related conspiracy narratives and fake news are negatively associated with vaccination willingness and infection-preventive behavior.1 The COVID-19 pandemic and associated infodemic have magnified the underlying problem of trust. The vaccine hesitancy is primarily a trust issue rather than an informational problem. Fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and vaccines should not be understood only as false beliefs, but also as indicators of popular anxieties and fears. Stress inoculation treatment can help people prepare for subsequent misinformation exposure and to increase misinformation detection.10 Finally, policymakers are advised to build information literacy skills for different levels and environments, and to move away from polarization attitudes and behaviors.

A scoping review of COVID-19 online mis/disinformation in Black communities.

Background: Mis/disinformation has reached an epidemic level with the COVID-19 virus and can be largely attributed to the growing digitalization of information and its rapid transmission via social media. Approximately 96% of Canadians and 80% of Americans report encountering COVID-19 dis/misinformation on at least one social media site/app. COVID-19 dis/misinformation promotes scepticism and a lack of confidence in COVID-19 interventions. Black people have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of negative impacts on their livelihoods and are also more likely to be hesitant to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Dis/misinformation contributes to high rates of COVID-19 infection and low uptake of COVID-19 vaccination. Hence, the purpose of this scoping review was to map out the nature and extent of current research on COVID-19 disinformation among Blacks in Africa and the African diaspora. Methods: We searched and reviewed articles from major databases such as MEDLINE, EMBASE, and CINAHL. Our search strategy involved the following concepts: 1) COVID-19, including variants; 2) misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news, and modes of misinformation transmission such as social media; and 3) Blacks or people of African descent, or the African diaspora. We retrieved 600 articles that were independently screened by two researchers. We included studies focusing on 1) Black people living inside or outside Africa; and 2) COVID-19 online dis/misinformation among this population. A total of 19 studies fit our inclusion criteria. We used a thematic analysis to analyse qualitative data. Results: Our findings indicate Black people are accessing and often sharing online disinformation and misinformation primarily through social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Dis/misinformation concerns the origin of COVID-19, transmission, prevention, and treatment of COVID-19, assertions of race immunity to the virus, distrust in government and health organizations, and intervention research and programming. Conclusions: There is a global paucity of literature addressing COVID-19 online dis/misinformation among Black people. Dis/misinformation can fuel vaccine hesitancy and threaten the goal of herd immunity. Knowledge of the impact and implications of COVID-19 online dis/misinformation is necessary to inform public health interventions in Black communities.

How Vaccination Rumours Spread Online: Tracing the Dissemination of Information Regarding Adverse Events of COVID-19 Vaccines.

Objectives: To trace the emergence and dissemination of the most prominent rumours about potential adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines. Methods: We use a weekly Google Trends search to gather information about what alleged adverse events are being associated with COVID vaccines by the general population. We then use CrowdTangle and Factiva searches to examine how discussions about the five most prominent adverse events have spread through traditional media channels and Facebook. Results: Traditional mass media reporting remains crucial in both promoting and moderating discussions around alleged adverse events. While some cases illustrate that social media networks can synthesise and amplify rumours about adverse events, traditional media coverage remains crucial as a forum for exploring and debunking spurious claims. Conclusion: Traditional media stories still bear signficant responsibility as credibility markers for rumours about vaccine adverse events. Journalists should therefore be encouraged to be particularly earnest when reporting such stories, and the scientific community should aid journalists in this task by clearly responding to any rumours emerging online.

Analyzing COVID-19 disinformation on Twitter using the hashtags #scamdemic and #plandemic: Retrospective study.

INTRODUCTION: The use of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an "infodemic" of mis- and disinformation with potentially grave consequences. To explore means of counteracting disinformation, we analyzed tweets containing the hashtags #Scamdemic and #Plandemic. METHODS: Using a Twitter scraping tool called twint, we collected 419,269 English-language tweets that contained "#Scamdemic" or "#Plandemic" posted in 2020. Using the Twitter application-programming interface, we extracted the same tweets (by tweet ID) with additional user metadata. We explored descriptive statistics of tweets including their content and user profiles, analyzed sentiments and emotions, performed topic modeling, and determined tweet availability in both datasets. RESULTS: After removal of retweets, replies, non-English tweets, or duplicate tweets, 40,081 users tweeted 227,067 times using our selected hashtags. The mean weekly sentiment was overall negative for both hashtags. One in five users who used these hashtags were suspended by Twitter by January 2021. Suspended accounts had an average of 610 followers and an average of 6.7 tweets per user, while active users had an average of 472 followers and an average of 5.4 tweets per user. The most frequent tweet topic was "Complaints against mandates introduced during the pandemic" (79,670 tweets), which included complaints against masks, social distancing, and closures. DISCUSSION: While social media has democratized speech, it also permits users to disseminate potentially unverified or misleading information that endangers people's lives and public health interventions. Characterizing tweets and users that use hashtags associated with COVID-19 pandemic denial allowed us to understand the extent of misinformation. With the preponderance of inaccessible original tweets, we concluded that posters were in denial of the COVID-19 pandemic and sought to disperse related mis- or disinformation resulting in suspension. CONCLUSION: Leveraging 227,067 tweets with the hashtags #scamdemic and #plandemic in 2020, we were able to elucidate important trends in public disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.

Fake news and the seven sins of capital: a metaphorical analysis of vices in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. / As fake news e os sete pecados do capital: uma análise metafórica de vícios no contexto pandêmico da COVID-19.

Health crises spawn "sins" and moral deformities in society that are evident when they emerge but had seemed to be dormant to collective awareness before. Through the metaphor of the seven capital sins, the article analyzes the phenomenon of fake news in the social media and in the scenario of the COVID-19 pandemic: the lust of sensationalism through the seduction and exploitation of vulnerabilities associated with fear of death; gluttony for confirmatory contents that spread untruths in the attempt to turn versions into facts; the catechism of denialism, fueling wrath or hate in restrictive epistemic environments; the greed of new technologies in the attention economy through engagement as a new commodity; competition for the spotlights of media visibility and derived gains that incite pride and envy in researchers that confuse public meaning with fake research, in a cycle that feeds sensationalism, gluttony, hate, and greed in attention capitalism. Finally, sloth is portrayed as the capital sin of opting for communicative inaction. In the comfort of bubbles, people renounce dialogue out of aversion to dissent, settling for positions of epistemic comfort. In short, the fake news phenomenon in the COVID-19 pandemic is portrayed here as the convergence of various vices that materialize as misinformation, in the communicative vacuity of the moments in which we are obliged to address each other to share our worldviews.

As crises sanitárias fazem surgir "pecados" e deformidades morais da sociedade que, embora evidentes quando despontam, pareciam antes dormentes à percepção coletiva. Por meio da metáfora dos sete pecados capitais, o texto analisa o fenômeno das fake news nas mídias sociais e no cenário da pandemia da COVID-19. A luxúria do sensacionalismo, que é viciosa pela sedução e exploração de vulnerabilidades ligadas ao medo da morte; a gula, por conteúdos de confirmação que disseminam inverdades no empenho de converter versões em fatos; a catequese do negacionismo gerando o ódio em ambientes epistêmicos restritivos; a ganância das novas tecnologias da economia da atenção pelo engajamento como nova commodity; a competição pelos holofotes da visibilidade midiática e ganhos derivados que incitam a soberba e a inveja dos pesquisadores que confundem o senso público com as fake researches - o que, em ciclo, nutrirão o sensacionalismo, gula, ódios e as ganâncias do capitalismo da atenção. Por fim, a preguiça é retratada como o vício capital dos que optam pela inação comunicativa. No conforto das bolhas renunciam ao diálogo por aversão ao dissenso, acomodando-se em posições de conforto epistêmico. Em síntese, o fenômeno das fake news na pandemia da COVID-19 é aqui retratado como a confluência de diversos vícios que se materializam como desinformação, na vacuidade comunicativa dos momentos nos quais somos obrigados a nos dirigir uns aos outros para partilhar nossas visões do mundo.

Las crisis sanitarias sacan a la luz "pecados" y deformidades morales de la sociedad que, aunque son evidentes cuando emergen, antes parecían latentes a la percepción colectiva. A través de la metáfora de los siete pecados capitales, el texto analiza el fenómeno de las fake news en las redes sociales y en el escenario de la pandemia del COVID-19. La lujuria del sensacionalismo que se ensaña con la seducción y la explotación de las vulnerabilidades ligadas al miedo a la muerte; la gula por los contenidos de confirmación que difunden las falsedades en el afán de convertir las versiones en hechos; el catecismo del negacionismo que genera el odio en entornos epistémicos restrictivos; la avaricia de las nuevas tecnologías de la economía de la atención por el compromiso como nueva commodity; la competencia por los focos de la visibilidad mediática y las ganancias derivadas que incitan a la soberbia, y la envidia de los investigadores que confunden el sentido público con falsas investigaciones -que, en ciclo, alimentarán el sensacionalismo, la gula, el odio y la avaricia del capitalismo de la atención. Por último, la pereza se presenta como el vicio capital de quienes optan por la inacción comunicativa. En la comodidad de sus burbujas renuncian al diálogo por aversión al disenso, instalándose en posiciones de comodidad epistémica. En resumen, el fenómeno de las fake news en la pandemia del COVID-19 se retrata aquí como la confluencia de varios vicios que se materializan como desinformación en la vacuidad comunicativa de momentos en los que nos vemos obligados a dirigirnos unos a otros para compartir nuestras visiones del mundo.

Decolonizing Knowledge Upstream: New Ways to Deconstruct and Fight Disinformation in an Era of COVID-19, Extreme Digital Transformation, and Climate Emergency.

Lies and disinformation have always existed throughout human history. However, disinformation has become a "pandemic within a pandemic" with convergence of COVID-19 and digital transformation of health care, climate emergency, and pervasive human-computer interaction in all facets of life. We are living through an era of post-truth. New approaches to fight disinformation are urgently needed and of paramount importance for systems science and planetary health. In this study, we discuss the ways in which extractive and entrenched epistemologies such as technocracy and neoliberalism co-produce disinformation. We draw from the works of David Collingridge in technology entrenchment and the literature on digital health, international affairs, climate emergency, degrowth, and decolonializing methodologies. We expand the vocabulary on and interventions against disinformation, and propose the following: (1) rapid epistemic disobedience as a critical governance tool to resist the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism and its master narrative infinite growth that is damaging the planetary ecosystems, while creating echo chambers overflowing with disinformation, and (2) a two-tiered taxonomy of reflexivity, a state of self-cognizance by knowledge actors, for example, scientists, engineers, and physicians (type 1 reflexivity), as well as by chroniclers of former actors, for example, civil society organizations, journalists, social sciences, and humanities scholars (type 2 reflexivity). This article takes seriously the role of master narratives in quotidian life in production of disinformation and ecological breakdown. The infinite growth narrative does not ask critical questions such as "growth in what, at what costs to society and environment?," and is a dangerous game of brinkmanship that has been testing the planetary ecological boundaries and putting at risk the veracity of knowledge. There is a need for scholars and systems scientists who break ranks with entrenched narratives that pose existential threats to planetary sustainability and are harmful to knowledge veracity. Scholars who resist the obvious recklessness and juggernaut of the pursuit of neoliberal infinite growth would be rooting for living responsibly and in solidarity on a planet with finite resources. The interventions proposed in this study, rapid epistemic disobedience and the expanded reflexivity taxonomy, can advance progressive policies for a good life for all within planetary boundaries, and decolonize knowledge from disinformation in ways that are necessarily upstream, radical, rapid, and emancipatory.

Health and science-related disinformation on COVID-19: A content analysis of hoaxes identified by fact-checkers in Spain.

A massive "infodemic" developed in parallel with the global COVID-19 pandemic and contributed to public misinformation at a time when access to quality information was crucial. This research aimed to analyze the science and health-related hoaxes that were spread during the pandemic with the objectives of (1) identifying the characteristics of the form and content of such false information, and the platforms used to spread them, and (2) formulating a typology that can be used to classify the different types of hoaxes according to their connection with scientific information. The study was conducted by analyzing the content of hoaxes which were debunked by the three main fact-checking organizations in Spain in the three months following WHO's announcement of the pandemic (N = 533). The results indicated that science and health content played a prominent role in shaping the spread of these hoaxes during the pandemic. The most common hoaxes on science and health involved information on scientific research or health management, used text, were based on deception, used real sources, were international in scope, and were spread through social networks. Based on the analysis, we proposed a system for classifying science and health-related hoaxes, and identified four types according to their connection to scientific knowledge: "hasty" science, decontextualized science, badly interpreted science, and falsehood without a scientific basis. The rampant propagation and widespread availability of disinformation point to the need to foster media and scientific caution and literacy among the public and increase awareness of the importance of timing and substantiation of scientific research. The results can be useful in improving media literacy to face disinformation, and the typology we formulate can help develop future systems for automated detection of health and science-related hoaxes.