People are increasingly exposed to science and political information from social media. One consequence is that these sites play host to “alternative influencers,” who spread misinformation. However, content posted by alternative influencers on different social media platforms is unlikely to be homogenous. Our study uses computational methods to investigate how dimensions we refer to as audience and channel of social media platforms influence emotion and topics in content posted by “alternative influencers” on different platforms. Using COVID-19 as an example, we find that alternative influencers’ content contained more anger and fear words on Facebook and Twitter compared to YouTube. We also found that these actors discussed substantively different topics in their COVID-19 content on YouTube compared to Twitter and Facebook. With these findings, we discuss how the audience and channel of different social media platforms affect alternative influencers’ ability to spread misinformation online.
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Examining the impact of sharing COVID-19 misinformation online on mental health
Abstract Misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic proliferated widely on social media platforms during the course of the health crisis. Experts have speculated that consuming misinformation online can potentially worsen the mental health of individuals, by causing heightened anxiety, stress, and even suicidal ideation. The present study aims to quantify the causal relationship between sharing misinformation, a strong indicator of consuming misinformation, and experiencing exacerbated anxiety. We conduct a large-scale observational study spanning over 80 million Twitter posts made by 76,985 Twitter users during an 18.5 month period. The results from this study demonstrate that users who shared COVID-19 misinformation experienced approximately two times additional increase in anxiety when compared to similar users who did not share misinformation. Socio-demographic analysis reveals that women, racial minorities, and individuals with lower levels of education in the United States experienced a disproportionately higher increase in anxiety when compared to the other users. These findings shed light on the mental health costs of consuming online misinformation. The work bears practical implications for social media platforms in curbing the adverse psychological impacts of misinformation, while also upholding the ethos of an online public sphere.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2027689
- PAR ID:
- 10352438
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Volume:
- 12
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2045-2322
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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