Media biases and decision-making at the social level

It is a common trend for using social and news media to track disease outbreaks. In particular, at the beginning of an outbreak, people have a dominant tendency to pick up the information from informal media rather than official sources since the data released by the official sources might be delayed by a few weeks. When official sources start covering outbreak news, the primary interest of people might shift to the information coming from official sources, while continuing to use informal media as alternative sources of data. Overall, informal media, as well as official sources complementarily, contribute to the community’s understanding of the epidemiology of an emerging outbreak.
During the COVID-19 outbreak, there has been an increasing interest in publishing posts on social media. By using the data available in these social environments, the exponential growth rate of COVID-10 could be estimated to fall within the range of 1.42 to 2.64 8. The rate is comparable to that reported by published articles for the same duration 9, implying the reliability of data gathered from social media. However, unreliable posts published in social media are an issue of rising concern, because, whereas the number of unreliable posts is less than that of reliable posts published in the social media, the number of reactions to unreliable posts is much more than that to reliable posts. During the COVID-19 outbreak, Twitter has appeared as a neutral social media 10, YouTube, and Reddit as the media of cutting unreliable data and Gab as the one of amplifying unreliable posts 8.
The engagement in social media was most pronounced on January 20, 2020, when the world health organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus as a pandemic species – spreading as quickly as more than four million cases being affected in only four months. Consequently, the COVID-19 became the subject of an infodemic – referred to as the circulation of misinformation about the disease 8. Effects of this infodemic – which is mostly formed by informal media – on the people’s perception have been extended to the behavior and action of people leading to a further worsening of the COVID-19 outbreak. To exemplify, CNN, on March 8, 2020, announced that Italy would impose a lockdown in the northern region. Therefore, a substantial portion of the northern population decided to travel to the southern region. It caused overcrowding in trains and airports, and since then, Italy increasingly encountered the new cases of COVID-19 for two weeks.
Now unreliable posts have the power to affect people’s perception disproportionally; it is necessary to avoid the sharing of these posts in the first place. Studies show that the diffusion of unreliable posts concerning the COVID-19 outbreak is largely due to non-thinking, and the force should be primarily directed to those who share the posts. Analytical thinking is an effective intervention for the problem. In the study 11, when people simply received a reminder to analyze the issue and judge the accuracy of the claim, they were more likely to indeed discriminate between true and false content on COVID-19.