ArticlePloS one2022
Twitter and Facebook posts about COVID-19 are less likely to spread misinformation compared to other health topics.
Article in PloS one, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 21 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
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Public Health Advocacy in Times of Pandemic: An Analysis of the Medicare-For-All Debate on Twitter During COVID-19.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Classifying and fact-checking health-related information about COVID-19 on Twitter/X using machine learning and deep learning models.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2025Article
- An evaluation of online information acquisition in US news deserts.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Impact of gist intervention on automated system interpretability and user decision making.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- Assessment of information quality in the largest Danish Facebook group on atopic diseases: a mixed bag of help and harm.Frontiers in allergy · 2024Article
- Correction: Twitter and Facebook posts about COVID-19 are less likely to spread misinformation compared to other health topics.PloS one · 2024Article
- Assessment of the Early Detection of Anosmia and Ageusia Symptoms in COVID-19 on Twitter: Retrospective Study.JMIR infodemiology · 2023Article
- The efficacy of Facebook's vaccine misinformation policies and architecture during the COVID-19 pandemic.Science advances · 2023Article
- Article
- [Development of the INSABI educational strategy: a lesson learned from the COVID-19 epidemic].Revista medica del Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social · 2023Article
- One Year of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation on Twitter: Longitudinal Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Cause and effect: On the antecedents and consequences of conspiracy theory beliefs.Current opinion in psychology · 2022Review
- Pretrained Transformer Language Models Versus Pretrained Word Embeddings for the Detection of Accurate Health Information on Arabic Social Media: Comparative Study.JMIR formative research · 2022Article
- Narrative elaboration makes misinformation and corrective information regarding COVID-19 more believable.BMC research notes · 2022Article
- Online misinformation is linked to early COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy and refusal.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- On the relationship between conspiracy theory beliefs, misinformation, and vaccine hesitancy.PloS one · 2022Article
- Have beliefs in conspiracy theories increased over time?PloS one · 2022Article
- Older adults' exposure to and posting of health-related messages on Facebook by chronic health condition status.Digital healthReview
- Tackling the COVID-19 infodemic among Syrian refugees in Lebanon: Development and evaluation of the "Wikaytek" tool.Digital healthArticle
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread attention to an "infodemic" of potential health misinformation. This claim has not been assessed based on evidence. We evaluated if health misinformation became more common during the pandemic. We gathered about 325 million posts sharing URLs from Twitter and Facebook during the beginning of the pandemic (March 8-May 1, 2020) compared to the same period in 2019. We relied on source credibility as an accepted proxy for misinformation across this database. Human annotators also coded a subsample of 3000 posts with URLs for misinformation. Posts about COVID-19 were 0.37 times as likely to link to "not credible" sources and 1.13 times more likely to link to "more credible" sources than prior to the pandemic. Posts linking to "not credible" sources were 3.67 times more likely to include misinformation compared to posts from "more credible" sources. Thus, during the earliest stages of the pandemic, when claims of an infodemic emerged, social media contained proportionally less misinformation than expected based on the prior year. Our results suggest that widespread health misinformation is not unique to COVID-19. Rather, it is a systemic feature of online health communication that can adversely impact public health behaviors and must therefore be addressed.
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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.