Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams, this is the Red Eye Podcast. In our show today, Lorentzism talks with Lisa Teichmann about a correlation her team found between social media use and lack of social distancing.
Speaker: A group of Canadian researchers have tied the level of misinformation about COVID -19 that people consume on social media to non -compliance with public health measures. They looked at both social media and traditional news outlets in Canada looking for instances of misinformation. For example, that COVID -19 was no more serious than the flu, that vitamin C or other supplements will prevent contraction of the virus,
Speaker: and that the initial animal to human transfer of the virus was the direct result of eating bats or that COVID -19 was a hoax or conspiracy. Their findings raised the alarm over the implications for public health when people are heavily exposed to misinformation during a pandemic.
Speaker: Lisa Tegman is one of the researchers of the peer reviewed study published on misinformation review. She is a PhD candidate in languages, literature, and cultures at McGill University. And Lisa joins me now from Montreal. Hello, Lisa. Hi. Your team combed through a massive amount of media to evaluate the messages around COVID -19. What sources of information did you look at and what were you looking for?
Speaker: For this project, we specifically looked at, we did a social media analysis. This we only did for Twitter for this study. However, in some subsequent studies, we're also looking at other social media platforms such as Facebook. And we also looked at a data set of traditional news pages. And we also did a nationally representative survey.
Speaker: It sounds like there were a lot of tweets, two and a half million that you went through.
Speaker: At that time, yes. And that is only between the timeframe, the studies covering that's March 26th to April 6th, 2020. So all our subsequent studies are obviously also taking all the new data in all the time. So by now in newer studies, we will have a much more comprehensive view of what happened from the beginning of the outbreak of the pandemic until now.
Speaker: What did you do to categorize whether information was accurate or not?
Speaker: In the terms that misinformation was present or not present, we coded and annotated manually a subset of tweets for these different categories that we had. So we had this not as bad as the flu category. We had the vitamin C cures COVID category and we had the eating bad soup category. And then we basically ran our model on this annotated data.
Speaker: How did the messages and information in social media compare with what you found in news outlets? So we found obviously that social media plays a huge role in the spread of misinformation.
Speaker: We found that people who get their news from social media, such as Twitter, are more likely to have misperception of COVID -19, while people who consume more traditional news outlets are more likely to be well informed and to comply to social distancing measures.
Speaker: and risk management. If you compared the amount of misinformation in news media and on social media, how were they different? There was a much more widespread presence of misinformation on social media than on traditional news. So the next part of your research looks at that implication. Tell us about the national survey you did and what you were looking for there.
Speaker: So in our survey, we interviewed 2 ,500 Canadian citizens of 18 years and older, and we asked them about their risk perceptions if they think COVID causes a threat. And we also asked them about social distancing compliance, asking them if they comply with social distancing measures such as working from home, avoiding in -person contact with friends, family and acquaintances, and so on.
Speaker: And we also asked them about the exposure to traditional use and social media to get a sense of what kind of media are Canadians consuming when they look for COVID information. That's what we based our findings on, that people who consume social media, majorly, will not comply with social distancing or risk management or are less likely to comply with it.
Speaker: Were you able to show a direct connection between consumption of social media and decrease social distancing, or is it more the actual content of the social media? Were you able to determine that? Well, we were able to see that of those who consumed their news about COVID, predominantly on social media, also showed that they do not comply with social distancing or risk management, and that
Speaker: They also display a certain scientific literacy, which we also take into account. So, for example, following the advice of scientific experts and left -right ideology, we show that there's a link between the behaviors and the beliefs and the media that is being consumed. However, we cannot really prove if that is a casual link. We can just show that there is a link between these two things.
Speaker: Were the decreased attention to known health measures, could you link those to certain social demographics or political orientations or did you count for those and was it primarily the social media exposure?
Speaker: Yes, we did account for it. Our model takes into account age, occupation, education, also political beliefs, ideology we took into account. What was very interesting that we found is that across all these groups, there's a consistent effect of social assistance in compliance and the consumption of COVID related information on social media.
Speaker: Why should we be concerned about these findings, Lisa? Well, as recently some news outlets have been drawing their attention to the effects of misinformation on public health, that certain misinformation can actually put certain people at risk. And following all this cause of intention, actually the World Health Organization
Speaker: continuously cautions against misinformation regarding COVID on social media. And they also put in place some stop the spread campaigns to counter misinformation. But besides also social media platforms themselves actually have been drawing their attention on this issue.
Speaker: And they have been more actively fighting against misinformation by removing content, by flagging content, by sending up warning messages. They just removed seven million posts recently from Facebook, as we know of Tuesday, regarding misinformation about COVID.
Speaker: Do you think there are things that individuals can do when they're consuming media or see other people promoting misinformation about Covid -19?
Speaker: I mean, I think it's any individual's responsibility to inform themselves and to critically assess the sources and the information given to them from any source. However, also a subsequent study we're working on right now draws attention more on the responsibility of the government and government outlets to inform their citizens
Speaker: and to provide their citizens with appropriate information and to also increase exposure to this information. So in a study we're working on right now, we evaluate engagement patterns with government COVID -19 information to kind of give some advices to governments and how they can optimize their spread of helpful information to their citizens.
Speaker: Well, it's been great talking to you this morning and it's a really interesting study and we'll point people towards it. Thank you. I've been speaking with Lisa Taichman. She is one of the researchers of the peer reviewed study published on Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review, and she's a PhD candidate in languages, literatures, and cultures at McGill University. The Red Eye podcast is produced at the studios of Vancouver Co -op Radio.
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