DALLAS – August 04, 2022 – More than 225,000 tweets with the hashtags #scamdemic and #plandemic led to an “infodemic” of misinformation and disinformation on Twitter during the first year of the pandemic, according to a study by UT Southwestern researchers published in PLOS ONE.
Christoph U. Lehmann, MD
Spurred by concerns about the dire consequences of the spread of false information about COVID-19 on social media, members of UT Southwestern’s Center for Clinical Informatics set out to determine the scope of the problem and provide insight into future public health emergencies. .
“This conundrum was almost inevitable,” said Christoph U. Lehmann, MD, Professor of Pediatrics and Director of the Center for Clinical Informatics. “We were navigating new territory when SARS-CoV-2 was released into the world, so we were all learning as we went. Given the mutating virus, the evolving guidelines for treatment and precautions, and the enormous economic and social impact of the pandemic, the situation was ripe for the spread of unfounded claims about the disease.”
The researchers used a Twitter scraping tool called Twint to collect English-language tweets including #scamdemic or #plandemic. After eliminating retweets, replies, and duplicate tweets, they found that 40,081 users tweeted 227,067 times using the selected hashtags. While Twitter suspended a fifth of users associated with the tweets, 80% were left to post and repeat disinformation (defined as false information that is not intended to harm) and disinformation (false information that carries an intent to damaged).
Richard J. Medford, MD
“Combating these echo chambers where many people repeat and spread misinformation is critical,” said Richard J. Medford, MD, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Chief Medical Informatics Director at UTSW. “The Public Health team at UT Southwestern began exploring public sentiment and the role of social media early in the COVID pandemic to help identify misinformation. We modeled tweets related to COVID and published studies on public sentiment about social distancing measures and guidance on how to use Twitter and other social media data to monitor new disease outbreaks.
Working to understand health messages on social media and promote accurate information will be a priority for Dr. Lehmann and Dr. .
“The purpose of public health is to prevent disease, promote health and prolong the life of the population as a whole. “Nothing could be closer to this mission than combating false health information,” said Dr. Lehmann.
Other UTSW researchers who contributed to the study include first author Heather D. Lanier, a third-year medical student, Marlon I. Diaz, and Sameh N. Saleh.
Dr. Lehmann holds the Willis C. Maddrey, MD Distinguished Professorship in Clinical Science.
About UT Southwestern Medical Center
UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s leading academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty has received six Nobel Prizes and includes 26 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 2,900 are responsible for innovative medical advances and are dedicated to rapidly translating science-driven research into new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 100,000 inpatients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases and oversee nearly 4 million outpatient visits annually.
