Abstract

Amid the COVID-19 global pandemic, a highly troublesome influx of viral misinformation threatens to exacerbate the crisis through its deleterious effects on public health outcomes and health behavior decisions.
This “misinfodemic” has ignited a surge of ongoing research aimed at characterizing its content, identifying its sources, and documenting its effects. Noticeably absent as of yet is a cogent strategy to disrupt misinformation.
We start with the premise that the diffusion and persistence of COVID-19 misinformation are networked phenomena that require network interventions. To this end, we propose five classes of social network intervention to provide a roadmap of opportunities for disrupting misinformation dynamics during a global health crisis. Collectively, these strategies identify five distinct yet interdependent features of information environments that present viable opportunities for interventions.

Date

January 1, 1970

Authors

Lindsay E Young, Emily Sidnam-Mauch, Marlon Twyman, Liyuan Wang, Jackie Jingyi Xu, Matthew Sargent, Thomas W Valente, Emilio Ferrara, Janet Fulk, Peter Monge

Journal

American journal of public health

Volume

111

Issue

3

Pages

514-519

Publisher

American Public Health Association