Social media and COVID-19 misinformation: how ignorant Facebook users are?

20, May 2021 |

Authors:

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed a lot of lives around the world, not only with the virus but also with misinformation. Many researchers have investigated COVID-19 misinformation, but none of them was related to social media users’ diverse responses to different types of COVID-19 misinformation, which could be a timely exploration. To bridge this gap in scholarly literature, the present study based on 11,716 comments from 876 Facebook posts on five COVID-19 misinformation seeks to answer two relevant research questions: (a) How ignorant social media users are about misinformation? (b) How do they react to different types of misinformation? Following a quantitative content analysis method, this study produces a few novel findings. The results show that most of the users trust misinformation (60.88%), and fewer can deny (16.15%) or doubt (13.30%) the claims based on proper reasons. The acceptance of religious misinformation (94.72%) surpassed other types of misin- formation. Most of the users react happily (34.50%) to misinformation: the users who accept misinformation are mostly happy (55.02%) because it may satisfy their expectations, and the users who distrust misinformation are mostly angry (44.05%) presuming it may cause harm to people. The chi-square and phi coefficient values show strong positive and significant associations between the themes, levels of ignorance, and reactions to misinfor- mation. Some strengths, limitations, and ethical concerns of this study have also been discussed.