ArticleProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Association for Information Science and Technology2021
"COVID19 is_": The Perpetuation of Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories via Google Autocomplete.
Article in Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Association for Information Science and Technology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Misinformation and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.Vaccine · 2023Article
- Keyphrase Extraction for Technical Language Processing.Journal of research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
As the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic grew in 2020, uncertainty surrounding its origins and nature led to widespread conspiracy-related theories (CRT). Use of technological platforms enabled the rapid and exponential dissemination of COVID-19 CRT. This study applies social contagion theory to examine how Google Autocomplete (GA) propagates and perpetuates these CRT. An in-house software program, Autocomplete Search Logging Tool (ASLT) captured a snapshot of GA COVID-19 related searches early in the pandemic (from March to May 2020) across 76 randomly-selected countries to gain insight into search behaviors around the world. Analysis identified 15 keywords relating to COVID-19 CRT predictions and demonstrate how searches across different countries received varying degrees of GA predictions. When grouped with similar keywords, two major categories were identified "Man-Made Biological Weapon" (42%, n = 2,111), and "Questioning Reality/Severity of COVID-19" (44%, n = 2,224). This investigation is also among the first to apply social contagion theory to autocomplete applications and can be used in future research to explain and perhaps mitigate the spread of CRT.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.