Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 16, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 15, 2021 - Dec 27, 2021
Date Accepted: Jan 9, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 14, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
A Qualitative Thematic Analysis of ‘INFODEMIC: A Stanford Conference on Social Media, Ethics, and COVID-19 Misinformation’
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to challenge the world’s population, with approximately 266 million cases and 5 million deaths to date. COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation led to vaccine hesitancy among the public, particularly in vulnerable communities, which persists today. Social media companies are attempting to curb the ongoing spread of an overwhelming amount of COVID-19 misinformation on their platforms. In response to this problem, the authors hosted INFODEMIC: A Stanford Conference on Social Media and COVID-19 Misinformation (INFODEMIC) to develop best practices for social media companies to mitigate online misinformation and disinformation.
Objective:
The primary aim of this study was to develop recommendations for social media companies to address The COVID-19 Infodemic. The authors report the methods used to execute the INFODEMIC conference, conference attendee engagement and analytics, and a qualitative thematic analysis of the conference presentations. The primary study outcomes were the identified themes and corresponding recommendations.
Methods:
Using a constructivist paradigm, the authors conducted a thematic analysis of the 6-hour conference transcript to develop best practice recommendations. The INFODEMIC conference was the study intervention, the conference speakers were the study participants, and transcripts of their presentations were the data for this study. The authors followed the 6-step framework for thematic analysis described by Clark and Braun. They also used descriptive statistics to report measures of conference engagement including registrations, viewership, post-conference asynchronous participation, and conference evaluations.
Results:
A total of 26 participants spoke at the virtual conference and represented a wide array of occupations, expertise, and countries of origin. From their remarks, the authors identified 18 response categories and four themes: trust, equity, social media practices, and interorganizational partnerships. From these, a total of 16 best practice recommendations were formulated for social media companies, healthcare organizations, and the general public. These recommendations focused on rebuilding trust in science and medicine among certain communities, redesigning social media platforms and algorithms to reduce the spread of misinformation, improving partnerships between key stakeholders, and educating the public to critically analyze online information. Of the 1,090 conference registrants, 587 (54%) attended the live conference and another 9,996 individuals viewed or listened to the conference recordings asynchronously. Conference evaluations averaged 8.9 (best = 10).
Conclusions:
Social media companies play a significant role in the The COVID-19 Infodemic and should adopt evidence-based measures to mitigate misinformation on their platforms.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.