Volume 1, Issue 3 - Themed Issue: Misinformation and Global Communication

Purpose In light of the fact that people have more opportunities to encounter scientific misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, this research aimed to examine how different types of misinformation impact readers’ evaluations of messages and to identify the mechanisms (motivated reasoning hypothesis vs. classical reasoning theory) underlying those evaluations of message inaccuracy and fakeness. Design/methodology/approach This research employed data from an online experiment conducted in Hong Kong in March 2022, when the fifth COVID-19 wave peaked. The data were collected using quota sampling established by age based on census data ( N  = 835). Findings In general, the participants were not able to discern manipulated content from misinterpreted content. When given a counter-attitudinal message, those who read a message with research findings as supporting evidence rated the message as being more inaccurate and fake than those who read the same message but with quotes as supporting evidence. Contrary, one’s disposition to engage in analytical thinking and reasoning was not found to impact assessments of information inaccuracy and fakeness. Implications With respect to the debate about whether people are susceptible to misinformation because of cognitive laziness or because they want to protect their personal beliefs, the findings provide evidence of the motivated reasoning hypothesis. Media literacy programs should identify strategies to prepare readers to be attentive to personal biases on information processing. Originality/value Although many researchers have attempted to identify the mechanisms underlying readers’ susceptibility to misinformation, this research makes a distinction between misinterpreted and manipulated content. Furthermore, although the Cognitive Reflection Test is widely studied in the Western context, this research tested this disposition in Hong Kong. Future research should continue to empirically test the effects of different types of misinformation on readers and develop distinct strategies in response to the diverse effects found.

Purpose The purpose of this research was to use develop a sentiment model using machine learning algorithms for discerning public response about the misinformation correction practices of Muslim clerics on YouTube. Method This study employed three machine learning algorithms, Naïve Bayes, SVM, and a Balanced Random Forest to build a sentiment model that can detect Muslim sentiment about Muslim clerics’ anti-misinformation campaign on YouTube. Overall, 9701 comments were collected. An LDA-based topic model was also employed to understand the most expressed topics in the YouTube comments. Results The confusion matrix and accuracy score assessment revealed that the balanced random forest-based model demonstrated the best performance. Overall, the sentiment analysis discovered that 74 percent of the comments were negative, and 26 percent were positive. An LDA-based topic model also revealed the eight most discussed topics associated with ten keywords in those YouTube comments. Practical implications The sentiment and topic model from this study will particularly help public health professionals and researchers to better understand the nature of vaccine misinformation and hesitancy in the Muslim communities. Social implications This study offers the joint task force of Muslim clerics and medical professionals, and the future misinformation campaigns a sentiment detection model to understand public attitude to such practices on social media. Originality While the impact of misinformation on public sentiment and opinion on social media has been researched extensively, Muslim perspectives on combating misinformation have received less attention. This research is the first to evaluate responses towards Muslim clerics correcting religious vaccine misinformation using machine learning models.

Purpose The digital setting empowers users to actively engage in communicative actions. The problem is that this active communication can increase misjudgment in determining the facts around social issues. When this communication is integrated with partisan biases, the effects can be particularly detrimental. Our study tested whether active communication actions regarding social issues and different trust levels toward presidential administrations (Trump vs. Biden) would increase belief in conspiracy theories. Design/methodology/approach To examine this, the study used online survey datasets (Amazon Mechanical Turk, N  = 1355) collected during July and August 2021 concerning three political issues: the Afghanistan issue, the Black Lives Matter issue, and the Voter Fraud issue. Findings The findings show that among participants with more active communication actions, the higher Trump government trust is and the lower Biden government trust is, the more belief in conspiracy theories increases. Interestingly, interaction effects of trust in government and active communicative actions were found among both Trump and Biden supporters. Practical/Social Implications Combined with preexisting efforts to tackle misinformation online, there are extensive efforts underway to educate laypeople about the dangers of misinformation. People must understand that any person could fall into belief in conspiracy theories if they do not carefully diagnose their information behaviors. Originality/Value Our study can increase knowledge about people’s situational belief in conspiracy theories based on their political stance. The study can support future research, promoting a deeper understanding of belief in conspiracy theories.

Purpose The rise of fake news is an increasing issue for cancer patients. Specifically, the use of cannabis as a cure for cancer is the most shared social media content regarding alternative cancer treatments (Shi, Siyu, Arthur R. Brant, Aaron Sabolch & Erqi Pollom. 2019. False news of a cannabis cancer cure. Cureus 11(1). e3918. DOI:10.7759/cureus.3918). To better understand the relationship between fake news, perceived credibility, social sharing, and belief in health misinformation, we conducted an online experiment in the United States to explore how people react to fake cancer news on Facebook. Design/methodology/approach A four-condition between-subjects online experiment was conducted to examine whether the perceived credibility of information and comments serve as mediating factors to influence misperceptions and social sharing of cancer misinformation. Findings We find that it is the comments’ credibility rather than information credibility that acts as a mediator between the effects of exposure to variations of comments on cancer treatment misperceptions and social sharing intentions. Practical implications Our study provides important insights into correcting health misinformation on social media. Findings demonstrate the importance of healthcare professionals and organizations engaging with misleading and potentially harmful misinformation posted. Additionally, practitioners need to provide training to enhance individuals’ media literacy to better discern credible health information from misinformation on social media. Value The study advances prior misinformation correction and credibility literature. Theoretically, we find that perceived comments’ credibility act as a mediator in mitigating the spread of fake news. Furthermore, exposure to variations of corrective comments (vs. peers’ supportive comments) increased cancer cure misperceptions via comments’ credibility, a backfire effect indicating that cancer cure misperceptions persisted, were complicated, and difficult to correct.

Purpose An association between age and misinformation is frequently found in literature, which contributes to a moral panic about older people’s participation in the dissemination of fake news. This qualitative study adds context to this discussion by investigating why older people are motivated to engage with online information and why sharing matters in old age. Design/methodology/approach A 16-month ethnographic study was conducted with a group of older adults in São Paulo, Brazil. Participant observation was complemented by in-depth interviews in order to approach participant strategies to evaluate online content and health information. Findings Participants were connected in multiple WhatsApp groups in which they shared content associated with active aging. Sharing helped them to craft their identity as third-agers at the same time that their work as curators was motivated by the local work-oriented ethics. An indirect system of influences impacted the participants’ decisions to trust and share content. Content was evaluated based on long-term interpersonal trust, while health information was validated by expertise in the healthcare area. “Doctor friends” provided medical guidance by warming the health information that the participants found online. Practical implication Regardless of their level of education, older adults need expert friends to warm health information. This dependency impacts active aging and challenges the idea that the internet could empower health decision-making. Social implications This study provides information for policymakers and industries to understand how older adults can access health information and obtain medical guidance. Originality/value This paper shows how sharing behavior can be influenced by local cultural contexts and contributes to mitigating the causal association between age and fake news.

Purpose Fact-checking has been changing in recent years from an initial stage in which fact-checkers were more concerned with political discourse to a stage in which combating misinformation becomes the primary purpose. This work examines more closely the standardizing and the customizing aspects of active fact-checking outlets in Portuguese-speaking countries, focusing on the verification methods and organizational models in use. Design/methodology/approach Based on Content Analysis, we collected manually 318 posts during June 2019 from each fact-checking outlets website and then examined each post according to six general concepts: discourse, sources, context, classification, graphic representation, and financing. There were 15 active fact-checking outlets in Brazil (13) and Portugal (2). No active outlets were found in the African countries. Findings Although there is room for inventiveness in fact-checking practices, it is restricted to the classification models adopted and the graphic representation demanded by them. Only two largest Portuguese-speaking countries (Brazil and Portugal) have active fact-checking initiatives during the study period. In Mozambique, we found the outlet named Mozcheck that was inactive with no published content during the research period. From our analysis, we detected a pattern between the type of misinformation and the media to which it is most often linked: false information was circulated mainly in texts, while false contexts were mainly circulated in videos and images led to more manipulated content. In addition, in relation to the sources used to verification of the content, we noticed a large volume of posts relied only on sources came from contacts with press offices – this was especially true for political issues. Practical implications The analyzed data indicates that the standardization tendencies are related to the connection of these initiatives with traditional media. While the contrasting aspects of the fact-checking practices are related to the classification models and the graphic representation created by the outlets. Social implications It indicates that fact-checking outlets is still tied to traditional media in terms of its organizational and institutional business model. Inventiveness and innovation are restricted to the practice of fact-checking conducted by journalists and other professionals. Originality/value This is the first study to compare the practice of fact-checking in Portuguese-speaking countries and, besides looking at aspects of journalistic practice, it also seeks to analyze organizational elements of fact-checking outlets.

The growth of global online media necessitates a better knowledge of how these media affect the world. Communication researchers have examined how rhetoric and globalization interact dynamically; how information spreads through cross-cultural interactions, and how a growing global media landscape affects culture, society, economy, and politics. However, no study has aggregated the areas of focus of such studies in order to establish a trend of the discussion of online media and global communication scholarship in Nigeria. In this essay, we offer a pathway for understanding approaches to scholarship in online media and global communication in Nigeria. We review all articles on online media and global communication that were published in two Nigerian academic journals, The Nigerian Journal of Communication and the Journal of Communication and Media Research between 2015 and 2021 using our content categories of authorship, theory/theories used, study population, method of study and research focus. We found that social media, which has proved to be a very hot area of research among scholars worldwide, also occupied the pride of place among Nigerian scholars and that collaboration in research, which is a major way of growing and advancing knowledge, was also significantly common among Nigerian communication researchers. On the low side, however, we found, among others, that lack of funding was a major issue in Nigerian communication research as none of the 73 articles that we analyzed was funded.

The objective of this article is to carry out a review of disinformation research in the Ibero-American area between 2017 and 2020. To do this, American Psychological Association standards for social scientific reviews are followed and about 60 papers published in indexed journals in Ibero-America are analyzed, as well as published books on the subject. The results are shown grouped into three parts. First, the three fundamental concepts related to disinformation are reviewed: the term of disinformation itself, as well as post-truth and infodemic. Second, the main disinformation products are studied: fake news, information disorders and hoaxes, according to their types, themes, formats, and channels. In the third part, the main strategies against disinformation are presented, reviewing the published works of two of them: content curation and fact checking. The most notable authors, by quantity of research, on the subject are Magallón-Rosa with 6 works, Ufarte-Ruiz with 4 and García-Marín with 3 works. Likewise, the studies by Dolors Palau-Sampio (2018. Fact-checking y vigilancia del poder: La verificación del discurso público en los nuevos medios de América Latina [Fact-checking and surveillance of power: The verification of public discourse in Latin America’s new media]. Communication & Society 31(3). 347–365), Ángel Vizoso & Jorge Vázquez-Herrero (2019. Plataformas de fact checking en español. Características, organización y método [Fact checking platforms in Spanish. Characteristics, organization and method]. Communication & Society 32(1). 127–144), and Carlos Rodríguez-Pérez (2019. No diga fake news, di desinformación: Una revisión sobre el fenómeno de las noticias falsas y sus implicaciones [Don’t say fake news, say disinformation: A review of the fake news phenomenon and its implications]. Comunicación 40. 65–74), can be highlighted for their analysis of disinformation in the Ibero-American area; for their analysis of the typologies of hoaxes the work of Ramón Salaverría, Nataly Buslón, Fernando López-Pan, Bienvenido León, Ignacio López-Goñi & María-Carmen Erviti (2020. Desinformación en tiempos de pandemia: tipología de los bulos sobre la covid-19 [Disinformation in times of pandemic: Typology of Covid-19 hoaxes]. El profesional de la información 29(3). e290315) and for the proposals on curation the works of López-Borrull with collaborators. Conclusions include that the phenomenon of disinformation is highly polyhedral, but society has instruments to deal with it, such as curation and verification (fact checking).