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. 2022 May 19;17(5):e0267022.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0267022. eCollection 2022.

COVID-19 infodemic on Facebook and containment measures in Italy, United Kingdom and New Zealand

Gabriele Etta  1 , Alessandro Galeazzi  2 , Jamie Ray Hutchings  3 , Connor Stirling James Smith  3 , Mauro Conti  4 , Walter Quattrociocchi  1 , Giulio Valentino Dalla Riva  3
Affiliations

COVID-19 infodemic on Facebook and containment measures in Italy, United Kingdom and New Zealand

Gabriele Etta et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been characterized by a social media "infodemic": an overabundance of information whose authenticity may not always be guaranteed. With the potential to lead individuals to harmful decisions for the society, this infodemic represents a severe threat to information security, public health and democracy. In this paper, we assess the interplay between the infodemic and specific aspects of the pandemic, such as the number of cases, the strictness of containment measures, and the news media coverage. We perform a comparative study on three countries that employed different managements of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-namely Italy, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. We first analyze the three countries from an epidemiological perspective to characterize the impact of the pandemic and the strictness of the restrictions adopted. Then, we collect a total of 6 million posts from Facebook to describe user news consumption behaviors with respect to the reliability of such posts. Finally, we quantify the relationship between the number of posts published in each of the three countries and the number of confirmed cases, the strictness of the restrictions adopted, and the online news media coverage about the pandemic. Our results show that posts referring to reliable sources are consistently predominant in the news circulation, and that users engage more with reliable posts rather than with posts referring to questionable sources. Furthermore, our modelling results suggest that factors related to the epidemiological and informational ecosystems can serve as proxies to assess the evolution of the infodemic.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1
Overview of COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 depicted by: the cumulative number of confirmed cases (left) and deaths (middle), and the evolution of the Stringency Index (right) for Italy (IT—represented in blue), New Zealand (NZ—represented in yellow) and United Kingdom (UK—represented in green). Dashed lines represent the first plateau of the corresponding metric for each country, with a change ratio below than 1%.
Fig 2
Fig 2
Left panel: Average weekly number of posts that circulated on Facebook for Italy (upper), New Zealand (middle) and the United Kingdom (bottom), with respect to the news outlet category. Right panel: Average weekly number of post interactions for Italy (upper), New Zealand (middle) and the United Kingdom (bottom), with respect to the news outlet category of the post the interactions refer to.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Evolution of the normalized Online News Coverage Index (ONCI) for Italy (blue), New Zealand (yellow) and the United Kingdom (green).
Fig 4
Fig 4
Pearson’s correlation coefficient among ONCI (Online News Coverage Index), SI (Stringency Index), Number of COVID-19 Confirmed Cases and Posts computed on a weekly base for Italy (left), New Zealand (middle) and United Kingdom (right).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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