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1. On the relationship between conspiracy theory beliefs, misinformation, and vaccine hesitancy

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276082  

   Enders, Adam M.; Uscinski, Joseph; Klofstad, Casey; Stoler, Justin (October 2022, PLOS ONE)

   Jonason, Peter Karl (Ed.)

   At the time of writing, nearly one hundred published studies demonstrate that beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories and misinformation are negatively associated with COVID-19 preventive behaviors. These correlational findings are often interpreted as evidence that beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation are exogenous factors that shape human behavior, such as forgoing vaccination. This interpretation has motivated researchers to develop methods for “prebunking,” “debunking,” or otherwise limiting the spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation online. However, the robust literatures on conspiracy theory beliefs, health behaviors, and media effects lead us to question whether beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation should be treated as exogenous to vaccine hesitancy and refusal. Employing U.S. survey data (n = 2,065) from July 2021, we show that beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories and misinformation are not only related to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and refusal, but also strongly associated with the same psychological, social, and political motivations theorized to drive COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and refusal. These findings suggest that beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation might not always be an exogenous cause, but rather a manifestation of the same factors that lead to vaccine hesitancy and refusal. We conclude by encouraging researchers to carefully consider modeling choices and imploring practitioners to refocus on the worldviews, personality traits, and political orientations that underlie both health-related behaviors and beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation. 

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2. COVID-19: Social Media Sources of Authority During a Global Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77685-5_23  

   Alsoubai, A. (July 2021, the Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII 2021))

   null (Ed.)

   Since the start of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, social media platforms have been filled with discussions about the global health crisis. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) has highlighted the importance of seeking credible sources of information on social media regarding COVID-19. In this study, we conducted an in-depth analysis of Twitter posts about COVID-19 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to identify influential sources of COVID-19 information and understand the characteristics of these sources. We identified influential accounts based on an information diffusion network representing the interactions of Twitter users who discussed COVID-19 in the United States over a 24-h period. The network analysis revealed 11 influential accounts that we categorized as: 1) political authorities (elected government officials), 2) news organizations, and 3) personal accounts. Our findings showed that while verified accounts with a large following tended to be the most influential users, smaller personal accounts also emerged as influencers. Our analysis revealed that other users often interacted with influential accounts in response to news about COVID-19 cases and strongly contested political arguments received the most interactions overall. These findings suggest that political polarization was a major factor in COVID-19 information diffusion. We discussed the implications of political polarization on social media for COVID-19 communication. 

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3. Party over pandemic: Polarized trust in political leaders and experts explains public support for COVID-19 policies

   https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302221118534  

   Cole, Jennifer C.; Flores, Alexandra; Jiga-Boy, Gabriela M.; Klein, Olivier; Sherman, David K.; Van Boven, Leaf (September 2022, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations)

   Two experiments examined the polarization of public support for COVID-19 policies due to people’s (lack of) trust in political leaders and nonpartisan experts. In diverse samples in the United States (Experiment 1; N = 1,802) and the United Kingdom (Experiment 2; N = 1,825), participants evaluated COVID-19 policies that were framed as proposed by ingroup political leaders, outgroup political leaders, nonpartisan experts, or, in the United States, a bipartisan group of political leaders. At the time of the study in April 2020, COVID-19 was an unfamiliar and shared threat. Therefore, there were theoretical reasons suggesting that attitudes toward COVID-19 policy may not have been politically polarized. Yet, our results demonstrated that even relatively early in the pandemic people supported policies from ingroup political leaders more than the same policies from outgroup leaders, extending prior research on how people align their policy stances to political elites from their own parties. People also trusted experts and ingroup political leaders more than they did outgroup political leaders. Partly because of this polarized trust, policies from experts and bipartisan groups were more widely supported than policies from ingroup political leaders. These results illustrate the potentially detrimental role political leaders may play and the potential for effective leadership by bipartisan groups and nonpartisan experts in shaping public policy attitudes during crises. 

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4. Politicians polarize and experts depolarize public support for COVID-19 management policies across countries

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117543119  

   Flores, Alexandra; Cole, Jennifer C.; Dickert, Stephan; Eom, Kimin; Jiga-Boy, Gabriela M.; Kogut, Tehila; Loria, Riley; Mayorga, Marcus; Pedersen, Eric J.; Pereira, Beatriz; et al (January 2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Political polarization impeded public support for policies to reduce the spread of COVID-19, much as polarization hinders responses to other contemporary challenges. Unlike previous theory and research that focused on the United States, the present research examined the effects of political elite cues and affective polarization on support for policies to manage the COVID-19 pandemic in seven countries ( n = 12,955): Brazil, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across countries, cues from political elites polarized public attitudes toward COVID-19 policies. Liberal and conservative respondents supported policies proposed by ingroup politicians and parties more than the same policies from outgroup politicians and parties. Respondents disliked, distrusted, and felt cold toward outgroup political elites, whereas they liked, trusted, and felt warm toward both ingroup political elites and nonpartisan experts. This affective polarization was correlated with policy support. These findings imply that policies from bipartisan coalitions and nonpartisan experts would be less polarizing, enjoying broader public support. Indeed, across countries, policies from bipartisan coalitions and experts were more widely supported. A follow-up experiment replicated these findings among US respondents considering international vaccine distribution policies. The polarizing effects of partisan elites and affective polarization emerged across nations that vary in cultures, ideologies, and political systems. Contrary to some propositions, the United States was not exceptionally polarized. Rather, these results suggest that polarizing processes emerged simply from categorizing people into political ingroups and outgroups. Political elites drive polarization globally, but nonpartisan experts can help resolve the conflicts that arise from it. 

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5. Understanding the Use of Images to Spread COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3579542  

   Wang, Yuping; Ling, Chen; Stringhini, Gianluca (April 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   While COVID-19 text misinformation has already been investigated by various scholars, fewer research efforts have been devoted to characterizing and understanding COVID-19 misinformation that is carried out through visuals like photographs and memes. In this paper, we present a mixed-method analysis of image-based COVID-19 misinformation in 2020 on Twitter. We deploy a computational pipeline to identify COVID-19 related tweets, download the images contained in them, and group together visually similar images. We then develop a codebook to characterize COVID-19 misinformation and manually label images as misinformation or not. Finally, we perform a quantitative analysis of tweets containing COVID-19 misinformation images. We identify five types of COVID-19 misinformation, from a wrong understanding of the threat severity of COVID-19 to the promotion of fake cures and conspiracy theories. We also find that tweets containing COVID-19 misinformation images do not receive more interactions than baseline tweets with random images posted by the same set of users. As for temporal properties, COVID-19 misinformation images are shared for longer periods of time than non-misinformation ones, as well as have longer burst times. %\ywi added "have'' %\ywFor RQ2, we compare non-misinformation images instead of random images, and so it is not a direct comparison. When looking at the users sharing COVID-19 misinformation images on Twitter from the perspective of their political leanings, we find that pro-Democrat and pro-Republican users share a similar amount of tweets containing misleading or false COVID-19 images. However, the types of images that they share are different: while pro-Democrat users focus on misleading claims about the Trump administration's response to the pandemic, as well as often sharing manipulated images intended as satire, pro-Republican users often promote hydroxychloroquine, an ineffective medicine against COVID-19, as well as conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus. Our analysis sets a basis for better understanding COVID-19 misinformation images on social media and the nuances in effectively moderate them. 

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