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Misinformation and Disinformation in the Era of COVID-19: The Role of Primary Information Sources and the Development of Attitudes Toward Vaccination

Published: 06 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Misinformation is not new; however, the proliferation of social media has resulted in a much broader reach and instantaneous impact. Results from such proliferation were seen during the 2016 and 2020 elections in the United States. The reach of false information in the context of a U.S. Presidential election would not be the pinnacle of the harm it can cause. In the current context, the spread of false information in the middle of a pandemic and related to causes, cures, and conspiracies, has the potential to do real harm, if it has not already. Now that vaccines are widely available in some countries, this harm may result in lives being lost that did not have to be. In this paper, we explore vaccination status in the context of information sources used by individuals. The results suggest that a lack of trust and engagement in traditional news outlets is associated with lower levels of COVID-19 vaccination initiation or completion. Higher levels of engagement with sources that have been used in the past to propagate conspiracy theories, such as YouTube, are also associated with lower levels of vaccination initiation or completion. Public health implications and the need for greater information literacy are discussed.

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)YouTube and Conspiracy Theories: A Longitudinal Audit of Information PanelsProceedings of the 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3648188.3675128(273-284)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Global Misinformation & Disinformation Special Issue IntroductionInternational Journal of Public Opinion Research10.1093/ijpor/edae03036:3Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Nonlinear effect of sentiments and opinion sharing on vaccination decision in face of an outbreak: A multiplex network approachChaos, Solitons & Fractals10.1016/j.chaos.2023.114014175(114014)Online publication date: Oct-2023
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGITE '21: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Information Technology Education
      October 2021
      165 pages
      ISBN:9781450383554
      DOI:10.1145/3450329
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Published: 06 October 2021

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      Author Tags

      1. covid-19
      2. disinformation
      3. information integrity
      4. misinformation
      5. security
      6. survey
      7. vaccination status

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      View all
      • (2024)YouTube and Conspiracy Theories: A Longitudinal Audit of Information PanelsProceedings of the 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3648188.3675128(273-284)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
      • (2024)Global Misinformation & Disinformation Special Issue IntroductionInternational Journal of Public Opinion Research10.1093/ijpor/edae03036:3Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
      • (2023)Nonlinear effect of sentiments and opinion sharing on vaccination decision in face of an outbreak: A multiplex network approachChaos, Solitons & Fractals10.1016/j.chaos.2023.114014175(114014)Online publication date: Oct-2023
      • (2023)From crisis to opportunity: practices and technologies for a more effective post-COVID classroomEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-023-11929-929:5(5981-6003)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2023
      • (2022)Datavoidant: An AI System for Addressing Political Data Voids on Social MediaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35556166:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
      • (2022)Meaningful Context, a Red Flag, or Both? Preferences for Enhanced Misinformation Warnings Among US Twitter UsersProceedings of the 2022 European Symposium on Usable Security10.1145/3549015.3555671(189-201)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2022
      • (2022)Bouncing Forward from COVID in Higher EducationProceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3537674.3554743(73-77)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2022

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