Spread and sources of information and misinformation about COVID-19 early during the pandemic in a U.S. national cohort study
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Abstract
Background
Early in the pandemic, misinformation about COVID-19 was spread on social media. The purpose of this study was to describe trusted sources of COVID-19 information and claims seen and believed about COVID-19 early in the pandemic among U.S. adults. Then, we assessed the impact of believing such claims on engaging in personal protective actions (PPA).
Methods
We used baseline data from the CHASING COVID Cohort ( n = 7,070) collected March 28, 2020 to April 20, 2020 to describe trusted sources of COVID-19 information as well as claims circulating on social media that had been seen and believed. We used Poisson regression to determine the association of believing certain claims with engaging in a higher number of PPA.
Results
The top three trusted sources of COVID-19 information were the CDC (67.9%), the WHO (53.7%), and State Health Departments (53.0%). Several COVID-19 claims circulated on social media had been seen, e.g., that the virus was created in a laboratory (54.8%). Moreover, substantial proportions of participants indicated agreement with some of these claims. In multivariable regression, we found that belief in certain claims was associated with engaging in a higher number of PPA. For example, believing that paper masks would prevent transmission of the virus was associated with engaging in a higher number of protective actions (β = 0.02, 95% CI: 0.004 – 0.046).
Conclusions
Results suggest the need for public health leadership on social media platforms to combat misinformation and supports social media as a tool to further public health interventions.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.10.21252851: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: The study protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the City University of New York (CUNY). Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study should be interpreted in light of its limitations. First, our study used multiple recruitment methods to achieve …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.10.21252851: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: The study protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the City University of New York (CUNY). Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study should be interpreted in light of its limitations. First, our study used multiple recruitment methods to achieve sampling goals (e.g., age and racial distributions). As such, participants were recruited from methods other than social media and resulting participant samples across available social media platforms are not equal. Our recruitment strategies limit comparisons between different social media platforms in terms of what claims were seen. However, they do help to highlight the importance of considering social media platforms when recruiting participants for research studies. Further, we did not ask on which social media platform participants had seen certain claims. This limits our ability to see which claims were circulating on certain platforms, however this data collection would be subject to recall bias as many people are on multiple platforms. The CHASING COVID Cohort was established early in the pandemic’s spread throughout the U.S., and these data are taken from the baseline assessment. Unlike other countries, the U.S. failed to “flatten” its curve, seeing a second surge in the summer, and a third in the fall 2020 (at the time this manuscript was prepared). It is important to understand our results in the context of when the data were collected. It would also be important to understand how trustworthiness of COVID-19 information may have changed over time given shifting views of how the public views the pandemic itself (e.g., pandemic fatigue) as well ...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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