July 9, 2022 • 16:10 - 16:20 | Saturday
Parallel 12 - Zhumu Conference: 614369889 : Zhumu Conference: 614369889
Parallel 12: Risk, emotion and behaviors beyond COVID-19

 [Purpose/ significance]“Infodemic” is being recognized as a multifaceted governance issue for human beings, and social media has become the matrix of misinformation, accelerating the “infodemic” to disseminate globally within the pandemic. Analyzing the risk characteristics of the spread of “infodemic” on social media is helpful to prevent and confront its secondary deleterious risks and improve the governance capability of misinformation. [Method/process] Quantitative methods were used to analyze the COVID19-related discussion and fake news accessed on WHO EARS-the public opinion monitoring platform of global social media and the COVID19MIINFO fact-checking platform respectively. A total of 3477474 tweets and 3362 fake news were collected and then counted and visualized from three indicators: spatio-temporal distribution, topic types and sources, to demonstrate the whole evolutionary process of the “infodemic” all over the globe. [Result/conclusion] The study found that the “infodemic” went viral featuring with its rapid speed, wide scope, difficulty in sources traceability, and influential politicization, specifically, fact-checking lagged behind the spread of “infodemic”; developed countries dominated the dissemination of the misinformation; multiple sources catalyzed the mutation of “infodemic”; political conspiracy mixed with misinformation intensified regional conflicts and stereotype. These features led to potential risk beyond the internet, extending into governance fragility, economic turbulence, vital and healthy threat, even trust deficit among countries, institutes and people. In order to effectively combat and manage the “infodemic”, it is time to innovate governance ideas and build a systematically global “infodemic” governance pattern by referring to the concept of a community of shared future in cyberspace as principle, in which the government, international organizations, media, and citizens collaborate together to gather global anti-epidemic efforts: (1) implement the emergency science popularization in advance and jointly build a global social media early-warning platform; (2) improve the effectiveness of risk communication and reconstruct social trust; (3) provide the psychological assistance mechanism and strengthen the global cohesion by emotional resonance.


Authors
  • Hongbang Zhang

    Xi'an Jiaotong University
  • Guanrui Xiao

    Xi'an Jiaotong University

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