Search results for "misinformation"
showing 10 items of 23 documents
Social media use to improve communication on children and adolescent’s health: the role of the Italian Paediatric Society influencers
2021
Abstract Background Fake news on children’s and adolescent health are spreading. Internet availability and decreasing costs of media devices are contributing to an easy access to technology by families. Public health organizations are working to contrast misinformation and promote scientific communication. In this context, a new form of communication is emerging social media influencers. Aim of this study is to evaluate the role of paediatric influencers (PI) in communicating information about children and adolescents’ health. Materials and methods A group of PI was enrolled from December 2019 to January 2020 by a scientific commission nominated by the Italian Paediatric Society (SIP). PI w…
Causality-based Social Media Analysis for Normal Users Credibility Assessment in a Political Crisis
2019
Information trustworthiness assessment on political social media discussions is crucial to maintain the order of society, especially during emergent situations. The polarity nature of political topics and the echo chamber effect by social media platforms allow for a deceptive and a dividing environment. During a political crisis, a vast amount of information is being propagated on social media, that leads up to a high level of polarization and deception by the beneficial parties. The traditional approaches to tackling misinformation on social media usually lack a comprehensive problem definition due to its complication. This paper proposes a probabilistic graphical model as a theoretical vi…
An exploratory study of COVID-19 misinformation on Twitter.
2020
During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the community. This resulted in 1 500 tweets relating to 1 274 false and 276 partially false cla…
Consumer interest in information regarding novel food technologies in Italy: The case of irradiated foods
2018
Recent food crises and uncertainty regarding food quality have pushed consumers towards a growing need to know more about the foods they purchase, including information related to both food quality and production. This paper identifies the main factors affecting consumer interest in receiving information on food irradiation technology. An online survey was used for research purposes and a total of 392 people, living in Italy, were questioned. Findings revealed that 89.2% of Italian consumers are interested in receiving information on the treatment of foods with ionizing radiation aimed at raising product safety. In particular, this interest was greater for respondents who reported a high se…
Tipología y patrones de los bulos difundidos durante la pandemia de la covid-19 sobre salud y nutrición
2022
This study aims to identify the typology and patterns of hoaxes related to health and nutrition disseminated during the first stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-November 2020). To do this, an exploratory quantitative study was carried out with two data types. The first data comes from studying 95 documents (scientific articles) found in the SCOPUS database through Boolean searches with the terms (dis)misinformation, hoax, health, and nutrition. A registration form was used for these documents, indicating the following items: a) topic of the article (health or nutrition); b) the type of wrong message (misinformation or hoax); c) the country in which the study was done; d) the type of part…
The meaning of biological signals.
2020
We introduce the virtual special issue on content in signalling systems. The issue explores the uses and limits of ideas from evolutionary game theory and information theory for explaining the content of biological signals. We explain the basic idea of the Lewis-Skyrms sender-receiver framework, and we highlight three key themes of the issue: (i) the challenge of accounting for deception, misinformation and false content, (ii) the relevance of partial or total common interest to the evolution of meaningful signals, and (iii) how the sender-receiver framework relates to teleosemantics.
Correcting Misinformation about the Science and Practice of Evidence-Based, Safe and Effective Ozone Therapy.
2021
The use of the Dark Web as a COVID-19 information source : A three-country study
2022
The Dark Web (i.e., the anonymous web or Darknet) contains potentially harmful COVID-19-related information and content such as conspiracy theories and forged certificates. The Dark Web may particularly attract individuals who are suspicious about the pandemic, but there is no research concerning the use of the Dark Web as a COVID-19 information source. In this study, we investigated the role of COVID-19 skepticism, online activities, and loneliness in the use of the Dark Web platforms as a COVID-19 information source. The data (N = 3000) were gathered in April 2021 from 18 to 75-year-old respondents from Finland (n = 1000), Sweden (n = 1000) and the United Kingdom (n = 1000). The responden…
Rotavirus and the web: analysis of online conversations in Italy during 2020
2021
Rotavirus is the most common cause of severe diarrhea among children worldwide. In 2017, Italy included rotavirus vaccination in its National Immunization Program. The use of social media monitoring, an efficient tool to understand vaccine hesitancy, has increased in recent years; however, only a few examples of such monitoring are available for Italy. Present study analyzed content on online sources, including social media, to identify factors contributing to Italian parents' decisions to vaccinate or not their children against rotavirus. Blogmeter Suite was used to search and analyze conversations related to rotavirus in Italian on online sources during 2020. These data were compared with…
Positive Learning in the Internet Age: Developments and Perspectives in the PLATO Program
2019
The Internet has become the main informational entity, i.e., a public source of information. The Internet offers many new benefits and opportunities for human learning, teaching, and research. However, by providing a vast amount of information from innumerable sources, it also enables the manipulation of information; there are countless examples of disseminated misinformation and false data in mass and social media. Much of the information presented online is conflicting, preselected, or algorithmically obscure, often colliding with fundamental humanistic values and posing moral or ethical problems.