
Covid19 Infodemic/Misinformation in the Social Media
Social media appear as very important channel for accessing, producing and sharing news. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, people turned to social media to read and to share timely information including statistics, warnings, advice, and inspirational stories. Thus, everyone could access and even distribute information about the epidemic. In this case, information began to come from more than one points with right or wrong sources to fill the information gap about Covid 19. Unfortunately, alongside all this useful information, there are also a new blending of misinformation on social media. Accordingly, due to the social panic triggered by the Covid 19 epidemic, it was inevitable that new problems would arise in the field of information and news reliability related to Covid 19 in the social media. As a result, misinformation and conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic, the source, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the disease began to spread through social media channels. Especially during the onset and rapid spread of the epidemic in all countries, the increase in the share of unrealistic news that may affect the masses of the disease has reached alarming dimensions. For example, when we have spent time online in the past few months, we probably all feel the difficulty of determining what information about the coronavirus vaccine is reliable and what is not. In this case, false news generally start to spread faster than factual news, in part due to its novelty and its capacity to generate emotive response. Thusly, misinformation as an important problem in the social environment causes rapidly to mislead the society and create perception.
As a result of that, in early February 2020, The World Health Organization defined this situation as the Misinformation Pandemic with the term “Infodemic”. An infodemic refers too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak such as the current pandemic. At the same time, false information is false or inaccurate information intended to be deliberately deceptive. So, an infodemic situation accelerates and sustains misinformation just like the current Covid 19 pandemic. To conclude, I can say that, with the Covid 19 pandemic, excessive information circulating on social media, in other words Infodemic, has brought a new dimension to the problem of misinformation and there is a struggle with both Covid 19 and Infodemic during this pandemic period. In this case, COVID-19 is not only a public health challenge and it’s also a public information challenge.