Misinformation and health in the pre-COVID era: A systematic review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35669/rcys.2023.13.e312Keywords:
disinformation, health, review, hoax, vaccine, internet, fakeAbstract
The coronavirus pandemic has been a turning point in health and communication research. Scientific work in this field has been rushed since the beginning of 2020, so it is important to know the previous situation in which the research was. This paper focuses on existing studies up to 2019 that relate health and any of its fields to misinformation.
We carried out a systematised bibliographic review of 171 articles collected in various scientific databases, the central theme of which was misinformation and health up to the end of 2019. Through the exhaustive analysis of different variables, this article aims to establish the starting point of research on hoaxes and health before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Research on health and misinformation maintained a clear upward trend between 2014 and 2019. Different epidemic diseases such as Ebola or the Zika virus are the most frequent in the articles analysed. However, the most relevant result of our analysis is the attention devoted to vaccine-related misinformation.
Despite the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, it has been the field of Health the mainly responsible for researching it, so, it is clear that there is a need for greater attention from the area of Communication to research this phenomenon.
Downloads
References
Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of economic perspectives, 31(2), 211-36. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.31.2.211
Brummette, J., DiStaso, M., Vafeiadis, M., & Messner, M. (2018). Read all about it: The politicization of “fake news” on Twitter. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 95(2), 497-517. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699018769906
Ceron, W., de-Lima-Santos, M. F., & Quiles, M. G. (2020). Fake news agenda in the era of COVID-19: Identifying trends through fact-checking content. Online Social Networks and Media. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.osnem.2020.100116
Cunha, E., Magno, G., Caetano, J., Teixeira, D., & Almeida, V. (2018). Fake news as we feel it: Perception and conceptualization of the term “Fake news” in the media. En: International Conference on Social Informatics, 151-166. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_10
Fallis, D. (2014). The varieties of disinformation. The Philosophy of Information quality, 135-161. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07121-3_8
García-Marín, D. (2020). Global infodemic: Information disorders, false narratives, and fact checking during the Covid-19 crisis. Profesional de la Información, 29(4). https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.jul.11
Giglietto, F., Iannelli, L., Valeriani, A., & Rossi, L. (2019). ‘Fake news’ is the invention of a liar: How false information circulates within the hybrid news system. Current Sociology, 67(4), 625-642. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392119837536
Li, Y. J., Cheung, C. M., Shen, X. L., & Lee, M. K. (2019). Health misinformation on social media: a literature review. PACIS 2019 Proceedings. 194. https://aisel.aisnet.org/pacis2019/194
López-Borrull, A. (2020). Bulos científicos, de la tierra plana al coronavirus, el impacto negativo que las mentiras. En: Alonso González, M. (2021). Desinformación y coronavirus: el origen de las fake news en tiempos de pandemia. Revista de Ciencias de la Comunicación e Información, 26, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.35742/rcci.2021.26.e139
Magallón Rosa, R. (2019). La (no) regulación de la desinformación en la Unión Europea. Una perspectiva comparada. Revista de Derecho Político, 1(106), 319-346. https://doi.org/10.5944/rdp.106.2019.26159
Matamoros, D. J. C. (2020). La comunicación sobre la pandemia del COVID-19 en la era digital: manipulación informativa, fake news y redes sociales. Revista Española de Comunicación en Salud, 1, 5-8. https://doi.org/10.20318/recs.2020.5531
Posetti, J., & Matthews, A. (2018). A short guide to the history of ‘fake news’ and disinformation. International Center for Journalists, 7, 1-19.
Pozo Montes, Y., & León, M. (2020). Plataformas fact-checking: las fakes news desmenti-das por Newtral en la crisis del coronavirus en España. Revista Española de Comunicación en Salud, 1, 103-116. https://doi.org/10.20318/recs.2020.5446
Rodríguez Pérez, C. (2019). No diga fake news, di desinformación: una revisión sobre el fenómeno de las noticias falsas y sus implicaciones. Comunicación, 40, 65-74. https://doi.org/10.18566/comunica.n40.a05
Shu, K., Bhattacharjee, A., Alatawi, F., Nazer, T. H., Ding, K., Karami, M., & Liu, H. (2020). Combating disinformation in a social media age. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 10(6), e1385. https://doi.org/10.1002/widm.1385
Southwell, B. G., Niederdeppe, J., Cappella, J. N., Gaysynsky, A., Kelley, D. E., Oh, A., Peterson, E. B. & Chou, W. Y. S. (2019). Misinformation as a misunderstood challenge to public health. American journal of preventive medicine, 57(2), 282-285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2019.03.009
Swire-Thompson, B., & Lazer, D. (2019). Public health and online misinformation: Challenges and recommendations. Annual Review of Public Health, 41, 433-451. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040119-094127
Suárez-Lledo, V., & Álvarez-Gálvez, J. (2021). Prevalence of health misinformation on social media: systematic review. Journal of medical Internet research, 23(1), e17187.
Toma, G. A., & Scripcariu, A. G. (2020). Misinformation ecosystems: A typology of fake news. Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology & Sociology, 11(2), 65-82.
UNESCO. (2013). Clasificación Internacional Normalizada de la Educación (CINE).
Wang, Y., McKee, M., Torbica, A., & Stuckler, D. (2019). Systematic literature review on the spread of health-related misinformation on social media. Social Science & Medicine, 240, 112552. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112552
Waszak, P. M., Kasprzycka-Waszak, W., & Kubanek, A. (2018). The spread of medical fake news in social media–the pilot quantitative study. Health policy and technology, 7(2), 115-118.
Artículos relacionados
Almansa-Martínez, A., Fernández-Torres, M. J. y Rodríguez-Fernández, L. (2022). Desinformación en España un año después de la COVID-19. Análisis de las verificaciones de Newtral y Maldita. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 80, 183-200. https://doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2022-1538
Román San Miguel, A., Sánchez-Gey Valenzuela, N. y Elías Zambrano, R. (2022). Los profesionales de la información y las fake news durante la pandemia del COVID-19. Vivat Academia, Revista de Comunicación, 155, 131-149. https://doi.org/10.15178/va.2022.155.e1312
Villa Gracía, A. D. y Cerdán Martínez, V. (2020). Bulos durante la pandemia del COVID-19 en España: un estudio a través de Google Trends. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 78,169-182. www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2020-1473
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Mónica Encinillas García, Rosa Martín Sabarís
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Disclaimer: As of 2023, RCyS is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Articles from 2011 to 2022 are under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License that allows copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format, remixing, transforming and building upon the material for any purpose, including commercial.
We also inform that RCyS is adhered to the Declaration of Berlin.