ArticleNature human behaviour2022
The supply and demand of news during COVID-19 and assessment of questionable sources production.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 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
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Modeling infodemics on a global scale: A 30 countries study using epidemiological and social listening data.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Infodemic Versus Viral Information Spread: Key Differences and Open Challenges.JMIR infodemiology · 2025Article
- Highly engaging events reveal semantic and temporal compression in online community discourse.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Dynamics and triggers of misinformation on vaccines.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- Misinformation Caused Increased Urban Mobility and the End of Social Confinement Before the Second Wave of COVID-19 in Amazonia.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2024Review
- The distorting effects of producer strategies: Why engagement does not reveal consumer preferences for misinformation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- IRMA: the 335-million-word Italian coRpus for studying MisinformAtion.Proceedings of the conference. Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting · 2023Article
- The role of the big geographic sort in online news circulation among U.S. Reddit users.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Truth and Bias, Left and Right: Testing Ideological Asymmetries with a Realistic News Supply.Public opinion quarterly · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Misinformation threatens our societies, but little is known about how the production of news by unreliable sources relates to supply and demand dynamics. We exploit the burst of news production triggered by the COVID-19 outbreak through an Italian database partially annotated for questionable sources. We compare news supply with news demand, as captured by Google Trends data. We identify the Granger causal relationships between supply and demand for the most searched keywords, quantifying the inertial behaviour of the news supply. Focusing on COVID-19 news, we find that questionable sources are more sensitive than general news production to people's interests, especially when news supply and demand mismatched. We introduce an index assessing the level of questionable news production solely based on the available volumes of news and searches. We contend that these results can be a powerful asset in informing campaigns against disinformation and providing news outlets and institutions with potentially relevant strategies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
35606514What OpenQuestion holds
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.