Item
Infodemic: disinformation and media literacy in the context of COVID-19
- Author
- By Julie Posetti and Kalina Bontcheva
- Year
- 2021
- Publisher
-
Internet Sectoral
Overview - DOI/Link
- View Source
- Abstract
-
The World Health Organization (WHO) has described the disinformation4 swirling amidst
the COVID-19 pandemic as a “massive infodemic” – a major driver of the pandemic itself.
Disinformation long predates5 COVID-19. The
fabrications that contaminate public health information today rely on the same dissemination
tools traditionally used to distribute disinformation. What’s novel are the themes and their very
direct impacts.
COVID-19 disinformation creates confusion
about medical science with an immediate impact
on every person on the planet, and upon whole societies. It is more toxic and more deadly than disinformation about other subjects. That is why this
article coins the term disinfodemic. This text facilitates the understanding of this
new menace, and of the many types of responses that are unfolding internationally. To do this, it
unpacks four dominant formats of COVID-19 disinformation and presents a typology that groups the
range of responses to the problem into ten classes.
The findings presented herein are the result
of desk research carried out by the authors, with
inputs provided by research collaborators.6 The
dataset on which the findings are based consists
of a sample of over 200 articles, policy briefs,
and research reports. This dataset was identified
by the researchers through systematic searches
in public databases curated by the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN),
Index on Censorship, the International Press Institute (IPI), and First Draft News, along with the
websites of news media, national governments,
intergovernmental organizations, healthcare professionals, NGOs, think tanks, and academic publications. - Language
- ENGLISH