Exposure to COVID-19 Misinformation in Spain, Brazil, India, and the US

The final session on this Thursday at ECREA 2022 that I’m attending is on disinformation, and begins with a paper by Laura Alonso-Muñoz and Andreu Casero-Ripollés that is being presented by proxy. It focusses on the circulation of misinformation via social media in the context of COVID-19. Residents in the Global South were most active in spreading such misinformation, it appears, and the present study therefore compares Spain, Brazil, India, and the United States via a quantitative survey of some 2800 people (or about 700 per country) in July 2021. These countries were selected because of their high social media penetration rate, and the substantial impact of COVID-19 they experienced.

Nearly half of all respondents received such misinformation at least once a week, but this also depended significantly on residence, income, and educational levels. Such misinformation was fairly evenly distributed across claims relating to masks, vaccines, the origins of the virus, potential cures, and the situation in the country. Citizens with university-level education received such misinformation more frequently. They saw reading traditional news, fact-checking services, media literacy, laws against misinformation dissemination, and government action plans as potential pathways for addressing such problems.

Reception of misinformation is therefore quite high, especially in Brazil and India, and such misinformation covers all bases. Information verification agencies – fact-checkers – were seen as particularly valuable responses against such content.