Open AccessINTO THE BELLY OF THE BEAST: THE RESEARCH ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND COVID-19 MISINFORMATION IN 2020
Author(s) -
Nicola Righetti,
Luca Rossi,
Giada Marino
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
selected papers of internet research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2162-3317
DOI - 10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12233
Subject(s) - misinformation , social media , popularity , disinformation , covid-19 , internet privacy , sociology , psychology , computer science , social psychology , world wide web , medicine , computer security , disease , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
In this paper we present some preliminary findings from an ongoingresearch on a comprehensive corpus of 378 interdisciplinary studies about misinformation andCOVID-19 published in 2020, focusing on the role of social media platforms in spreading andcountering mis- and disinformation. We followed the PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviewsto collect and screen results, and a coding scheme based on methodological and substantivequestions to analyze them. The preliminary results show, among others, that research onCOVID-19 misinformation reproduces a well-known trend of differentiated attention to socialmedia platforms based on both popularity among users and ease of access to data by scholars,that online survey distributed via social media has been a very popular approach, and thepresence of a wide range of perspectives, and sometimes diverging point of views, onproblematic information, in terms of prevalence of misinformation, countermeasures, and therole of social media communication. During the conference presentation, comprehensiveresults from the research will be presented.