JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

“Infodemic” is a term that refers to the deluge of false information about an event that is a global challenge for today’s society. The sheer volume of misinformation circulating during the COVID-19 pandemic has been harmful to people around the world. Therefore, it is important to study different aspects of misinformation related to the current pandemic.

Objective:

This paper aims to identify the main themes related to COVID-19 misinformation on various platforms, from traditional outlets (like television or newspapers) to social media. This paper will place these themes into categories, and track the changes and explore patterns in prevalence, over time, across different platforms and contexts.

Methods:

From a theoretical perspective, this research is rooted in framing theory; it also employs thematic analysis to identify the main themes related to COVID-19 misinformation. The data were collected from eight Fact-Checking websites which formed a sample of 127 pieces of COVID-19 news, published from January 01 to March 30, 2020.

Results:

The findings reveal 20 unique themes related to COVID-19 misinformation. Governmental political organizations (institutional level) and politicians (individual level) were the two most frequent themes, followed by origination and source, home remedies, fake statistics, treatments, drugs, and pseudoscience, among others. Results indicate that the prevalence of misinformation themes had altered over time, from January to March 2020. For instance, false stories about the origin and source of the virus were frequent initially (January). Misinformation regarding home remedies became a prominent theme in the middle (February), while false information related to government organizations and politicians became popular later (March). Although conspiracy theory webpages and social media outlets were the primary sources of misinformation; surprisingly, results revealed trusted platforms such as official government outlets and news organizations were also avenues for creating covid-19 misinformation.

Conclusions:

The identified frames in this study reflect some of the information attitudes and behaviors, such as denial, uncertainty, consequences, and solution-seeking, that provided rich information grounds to create different types of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some frames also indicate that the application of effective communication strategies, and the creation of timely content, were used to persuade human minds with false stories in different phases of the crisis. The findings of this study can be beneficial for communication officers, information professionals, and policymakers to combat misinformation in future global health crises or related events.