TY - JOUR
T1 - Going beyond fact-checking to fight health misinformation
T2 - A multi-level analysis of the Twitter response to health news stories
AU - Zhong, Bu
N1 - Funding Information:
The author would like to express his deepest gratitude to Dr. Akhil Kumar (Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University) for assisting with data cleaning and analyses as well as aggregating and writing up the results. The endeavor would not have been possible without his input and encouragement. The author's sincere thanks also go to the Editor, Dr. Yogesh Dwivedi, and his reviewers for their advice and constructive comments on the previous versions of this manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2023/6
Y1 - 2023/6
N2 - Health misinformation has become an unfortunate truism of social media platforms, where lies could spread faster than truth. Despite considerable work devoted to suppressing fake news, health misinformation, including low-quality health news, persists and even increases in recent years. One promising approach to fighting bad information is studying the temporal and sentiment effects of health news stories and how they are discussed and disseminated on social media platforms like Twitter. As part of the effort of searching for innovative ways to fight health misinformation, this study analyzes a dataset of more than 1600 objectively and independently reviewed health news stories published over a 10-year span and nearly 50,000 Twitter posts responding to them. Specifically, it examines the source credibility of health news circulated on Twitter and the temporal, sentiment features of the tweets containing or responding to the health news reports. The results show that health news stories that are rated low by experts are discussed more, persist longer, and produce stronger sentiments than highly rated ones in the tweetosphere. However, the highly rated stories retained a fresh interest in the form of new tweets for a longer period. An in-depth understanding of the characteristics of health news distribution and discussion is the first step toward mitigating the surge of health misinformation. The findings provide insights into understanding the mechanism of health information dissemination on social media and practical implications to fight and mitigate health misinformation on digital media platforms.
AB - Health misinformation has become an unfortunate truism of social media platforms, where lies could spread faster than truth. Despite considerable work devoted to suppressing fake news, health misinformation, including low-quality health news, persists and even increases in recent years. One promising approach to fighting bad information is studying the temporal and sentiment effects of health news stories and how they are discussed and disseminated on social media platforms like Twitter. As part of the effort of searching for innovative ways to fight health misinformation, this study analyzes a dataset of more than 1600 objectively and independently reviewed health news stories published over a 10-year span and nearly 50,000 Twitter posts responding to them. Specifically, it examines the source credibility of health news circulated on Twitter and the temporal, sentiment features of the tweets containing or responding to the health news reports. The results show that health news stories that are rated low by experts are discussed more, persist longer, and produce stronger sentiments than highly rated ones in the tweetosphere. However, the highly rated stories retained a fresh interest in the form of new tweets for a longer period. An in-depth understanding of the characteristics of health news distribution and discussion is the first step toward mitigating the surge of health misinformation. The findings provide insights into understanding the mechanism of health information dissemination on social media and practical implications to fight and mitigate health misinformation on digital media platforms.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2023.102626
DO - 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2023.102626
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85146934606
SN - 0268-4012
VL - 70
JO - International Journal of Information Management
JF - International Journal of Information Management
M1 - 102626
ER -