Digital mis/disinformation and public engagment with health and science controversies: Fresh perspectives from Covid-19
TLDR
In this article, the Covid-19 infodemic might just be the tipping point of a process that has been long simmering in controversial areas of health and science (e.g., climate-change denial, antivaccination, anti-5G, Flat Earth doctrines).Abstract:
Digital media, while opening a vast array of avenues for lay people to effectively engage with news, information and debates about important science and health issues, have become a fertile land for various stakeholders to spread misinformation and disinformation, stimulate uncivil discussions and engender ill-informed, dangerous public decisions. Recent developments of the Covid-19 infodemic might just be the tipping point of a process that has been long simmering in controversial areas of health and science (e.g., climate-change denial, anti-vaccination, anti-5G, Flat Earth doctrines). We bring together a wide range of fresh data and perspectives from four continents to help media scholars, journalists, science communicators, scientists, health professionals and policy-makers to better undersand these developments and what can be done to mitigate their impacts on public engagement with health and science controversies.read more
Citations
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The causes, impacts and countermeasures of COVID-19 “Infodemic”: A systematic review using narrative synthesis
TL;DR: In this article, a systematic literature search following the PRISMA guideline covering 12 scholarly databases was conducted to retrieve various types of peer-reviewed articles that reported causes, impacts, or countermeasures of the COVID-19 infodemic.
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Fake news agenda in the era of COVID-19: Identifying trends through fact-checking content
TL;DR: A novel Markov-inspired computational method for identifying topics in tweets that resulted in an important technique to cluster topics in a wide range of scenarios, including an infodemic – a period overabundance of the same information.
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Vaccine Hesitancy in the Age of Coronavirus and Fake News: Analysis of Journalistic Sources in the Spanish Quality Press.
TL;DR: Findings indicate that sources related to the government, professional associations and scientific companies are the most frequently used, confirming the central role of government institutions as journalistic sources.
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Scientific Literacy and Social Transformation: Critical Perspectives about Science Participation and Emancipation.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide a systematic theoretical analysis of the main visions of the concept of scientific literacy developed in the last 20 years, and describe a transition from a transmissive educational vision of science literacy to a transformative vision (Vision-III), with a stronger engagement with social participation and emancipation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Fake news agenda in the era of COVID-19: Identifying trends through fact-checking content
TL;DR: In this paper, a novel Markov-inspired computational method for identifying topics in tweets is introduced, which clusters topics and their current evolution in a predefined time window, in order to identify similarities and differences in what was shared by them.
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