A small research team of Sony Computer Science Laboratory in France has explored why false information has been existing and flourished during the global pandemic In their paper published in the journal Nature human behavior, Pietro gravino, Giulio prevedello, Martina Galletti and Vittorio loretom analyzed the supply and demand of covid-19 news during the pandemic, and compared the response of news agencies
A more striking feature of this global pandemic is that it seems that erroneous information continues to emerge, which is attributed not only to the virus and infected people, but also to the way the medical community has responded to this threat. From the absurd claims about the so-called treatment methods to the baseless claims made by anti vaccinators, false information prevailed.
In this new work, researchers wanted to know why this happened. They studied news sources, including reliable and unreliable, as participants in the supply and demand of the news ecosystem.
This work involves the study of Italian issues - they first obtain articles printed by Italian media sources in a public database. They also retrieved information from another database on articles published by the fact finding team, which helped them to distinguish news sources according to their reliability. All these articles constitute the supplier of the information system.
To further understand the need for information about the pandemic, the researchers looked at Google search trends, analyzed the search habits of people looking for information, and compared them with the responses provided by news sources. Researchers found that news sources identified as generally unreliable tend to respond more quickly to new information than more traditional and reliable sources.
Researchers have not yet been able to determine why unreliable news sources can respond faster, but they believe that the final result is that unreliable sources have higher visibility, leading to a wide range of false information to gain more traction and eventually be accepted by the public.