Social Media Surveillance and (Dis)Misinformation in the COVID‐19 Pandemic

Abstract

This chapter considers the virality of messages about the COVID-19 pandemic, with an interest in the ways in which systematic surveillance of such messages can serve important policy objectives, particularly in regard to managing the relative accuracy of public health information campaigns and the viability of the healthcare delivery response. Dismisinformation is amplified by social reinforcement forces in echo chambers, information bubbles, and homophilous networks further facilitated by the nature of social media. A number of hashtags related to dismisinformation have strong collocation and synchronization properties. The “COVID is a hoax/overblown” theme is coupled with the classic anti-vaccination theme of forced vaccinations and resulting autism. The bewildering variety of untruths uttered about COVID suggests a productive but rather random mechanism at work. Different platforms, cultures, and languages can produce different conversations about epidemics and the narratives and conspiracy theories attributed to such outbreaks. © 2021 John Wiley and Sons Inc.