In this work we carry out an exploratory analysis of online conversations on the Italian Facebook during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze the circulation of controversial topics associated with the origin of the virus, which involve popular targets of misinformation, such as migrants and 5G technology. We collected over 1.5 M posts in Itali...
Published in Online Social Networks and Media
There is an abundance of misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news” related to COVID-19, leading the director-general of the World Health Organization to term this an ‘infodemic’. Given the high volume of COVID-19 content on the Internet, many find it difficult to evaluate veracity. Vulnerable and marginalized groups are being misinformed and ...
Published in Online Social Networks and Media
During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of ...
Published in Online social networks and media
The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic gave rise to management approaches using mobile apps for contact tracing. The corresponding apps track individuals and their interactions, to facilitate alerting users of potential infections well before they become infectious themselves. Naïve implementation obviously jeopardizes the privacy of health conditions, loc...
Published in Online social networks and media
The adversarial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has created a health crisis globally all over the world. This unprecedented crisis forced people to lockdown and changed almost every aspect of the regular activities of the people. Thus, the pandemic is also impacting everyone physically, mentally, and economically, and it, therefore, is paramount to...
Published in Online Social Networks and Media
During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the video-sharing platform YouTube has been serving as an essential instrument to widely distribute news related to the global public health crisis and to allow users to discuss the news with each other in the comment sections. Along with these enhanced opportunities of technology-based commu...
Published in Online Social Networks and Media
The COVID-19 pandemic caused high uncertainty regarding appropriate treatments and public policy reactions. This uncertainty provided a perfect breeding ground for spreading conspiratorial anti-science narratives based on disinformation. Disinformation on public health may alter the population’s hesitance to vaccinations, counted among the ten most...
