Previously submitted to: JMIR Formative Research (no longer under consideration since Jul 24, 2023)
Date Submitted: Nov 15, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Disinformation of qualitative content analysis of user-generated online content about food and the COVID-19 discussed on Sina Weibo
ABSTRACT
Background:
This study focused on the online disinformation about taking food or supplements to prevent and treat Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on Sina Weibo（the Chinese largest new media microblog platform) during the first COVID-19 lockdown.
Objective:
In this study, we aim to investigate the disinformation of taking food or supplements to prevent and treat COVID-19 on Sina Weibo.
Methods:
We searched for relevant posts from February 20, 2020 to May 06, 2020through text mining techniques to identify those containing content of “ food or supplements could prevent the COVID-19”.In addition, the descriptive research was used to analyze disinformation datasets.
Results:
Of the 6601 original posts that were crawled from Weibo, we identified 2989 (45.28%) informative posts that spread false information about food or supplement by manual screening. The most frequent disinformation include Vitamin C(25.36%), garlic(22.38%), salt water gargle(14.32%), drinking more tea(12.98%), smoked vinegar(9.84%), onions(7.19%), drinking high alcohol(4.65%) could prevent or kill the COVID-19, the least frequent: sesame oil(1.81%), ginger(1.17%), brown sugar and boiled water with ginger, onion and garlic(0.3%) could prevent the COVID-19.
Conclusions:
Spreading false information that food or supplements could prevent the COVID-19 seriously affected people's daily eating habits. The diet disinformation was wrapped in a pseudoscientific shell that make it difficult for the ordinary without professional knowledge to identify it.
Citation
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