Open AccessFalse news around COVID-19 circulated less on Sina Weibo than on Twitter. How to overcome false information?
Author(s) -
Cristina Pulido,
Beatriz Villarejo-Carballido,
Gisela Redondo-Sama,
Mengna Guo,
Mimar Ramis,
José Ramón Flecha García
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
rimcis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.189
H-Index - 3
ISSN - 2014-3680
DOI - 10.17583/rimcis.2020.5386
Subject(s) - fake news , social media , internet privacy , covid-19 , misinformation , rumor , microblogging , computer science , advertising , political science , world wide web , public relations , business , computer security , medicine , disease , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
Since the Coronavirus health emergency was declared, many are the fake news that have circulated around this topic, including rumours, conspiracy theories and myths. According to the World Economic Forum, fake news is one of the threats in today's societies, since this type of information circulates fast and is often inaccurate and misleading. Moreover, fake-news are far more shared than evidence-based news among social media users and thus, this can potentially lead to decisions that do not consider the individual’s best interest. Drawing from this evidence, the present study aims at comparing the type of Tweets and Sina Weibo posts regarding COVID-19 that contain either false or scientific veracious information. To that end 1923 messages from each social media were retrieved, classified and compared. Results show that there is more false news published and shared on Twitter than in Sina Weibo, at the same time science-based evidence is more shared on Twitter than in Weibo but less than false news. This stresses the need to find effective practices to limit the circulation of false information.