Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Infodemiology
Date Submitted: Feb 17, 2024
Date Accepted: Feb 15, 2025
Infodemic vs. Viral Information Spreading: Key Differences and Open Challenges
ABSTRACT
Past the COVID-19 pandemic, the infodemic risk is still on the horizon due to novel health emergencies and the expanding role of Artificial Intelligence in the information supply and demand system. However, especially in time windows of seeming stability, a proactive effort toward advancing infodemiology is fundamental for increasing preparedness and improving public health outcomes. This comes at the cost of inspecting the foundations of this renewed discipline for understanding how we can identify an infodemic at the right time and scale and distinguishing it from other processes of viral information spread happening both within and outside the boundaries of public health. In this paper, by mixing competencies and experience from data science and public health, we discuss key differences between infodemic and viral information-spreading phenomena and lay out challenges and open points for future research.
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© 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.