Fact-Checking Interventions on Social Media Using Cartoon Figures: Lessons Learned from “the Tooties”

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Michael Opgenhaffen
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Lerner Papautsky ◽  
Richard J. Holden ◽  
Rupa S. Valdez ◽  
Jordan Hill ◽  
Janetta Brown

In the 4th panel on the topic of The Patient in Patient Safety, we highlighted topics of current relevance and facilitated a reflection session. The objective was to highlight the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted patient ergonomics research and work, with particular focus on safety. After a topic overview, panelists presented their work on overcoming challenges to human subjects research created by the suspension of face-to-face activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. A facilitated reflection and brainstorming session using Miro followed. We used questions to elicit examples of patient and caregiver roles in safety during the pandemic and research strategies and challenges. These questions were also distributed on social media prior to the event. The panel served as an opportunity to share lessons learned.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Guy Schnittka

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, people of all ages began sewing fabric face masks. Organized through separate grassroots movements, oftentimes using social media platforms, people pooled their resources to make masks for front line workers and others in desperate need. While some people sold these face masks, many participated in philanthropic crafting, donating them to hospitals and other health care centres. Older adults were identified early on as being particularly vulnerable to the effects of the virus, and so their response to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic through crafting was salient. This study investigated the experience of philanthropic hand crafting by older adults who were living through the COVID-19 pandemic. Twenty-seven older adults of age 60–87 who sewed masks for others were interviewed. A comprehensive data analysis of these interviews yielded 39 descriptive codes that were collapsed into eight themes: emotions, engagement, meaning, relationships, accomplishment, intellect, moral values and agency. One finding was that there were psychological, relational and existential benefits for the crafters. Making masks allowed participants to help other people, and it gave the participants a feeling of value, worthiness and purpose. Additionally, participants felt more in control in a chaotic world as they made masks to protect themselves, their loved ones, as well as strangers. The philanthropic crafting enhanced older adults’ well-being in many ways, and lessons learned from this study could be extended into ‘normal times’. For example, more older adults would be able to participate in craft-based philanthropy if they had access to the tools and materials. They would be more motivated if they received thank you notes and pictures of the recipients using their handmade gifts, and if they could express their creativity more. Finally, creating a physical or virtual community for older adults around craft philanthropy would help older adults feel more connected to and supported by their peers, and the community at large.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 1109-1129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petter Bae Brandtzaeg ◽  
Asbjørn Følstad ◽  
María Ángeles Chaparro Domínguez
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajay Agarwal

The bloom of COVID19 has resulted in the explosion of ripple pollens which have severely affected the world community in the terms of their multi-axial impact. These pollens, despite being indistinguishable, have a varied set of characteristics in terms of their origin and contribution towards the overall declining homeostasis of human beings. The most prominent of these pollens are misinformation. Various studies have been conducted, performed, and stochastically replicated to build ML-based models to accurately detect misinformation and its variates on the common modalities of spread. However, the recent independent analysis conducted on the prior studies reveals how the current fact-checking systems fail and fall flat in fulfilling any practical demands that the misinfodemic of COVID19 brought for us. While the scientific community broadly accepts the pandemic-like resemblance of the rampant misinformation spread, we must also make sure that our response to the same is multi-faceted, interdisciplinary, and doesn't stand restricted. As crucial it is to chart the features of misinformation spread, it is also important to understand why it spreads in the first place? Our paper deals with the latter question through a game-theory-based approach. We implement a game with two social media users or players who aim at increasing their outreach on their social media handles whilst spreading misinformation knowingly. We take five independent parameters from 100 Twitter handles that have shared misinformation during the period of COVID19. Twitter was chosen as it is a prominent social media platform accredited to the major modality for misinformation spread. The outreach increment on the user’s Twitter handles was measured using various features provided by Twitter- number of comments, number of retweets, and number of likes. Later, using a computational neuroscientific approach, we map each of these features with the type of neural system they trigger in a person’s brain. This helps in understanding how misinformation whilst being used as an intentional decoy to increase outreach on social media, also, affects the human social cognition system eliciting pseudo-responses that weren’t intended otherwise leading to realizing possible neuroscientific correlation as to how spreading misinformation on social media intentionally/unintentionally becomes a strategic maneuver to increased reach and possibly a false sense of accomplishment.


Plaridel ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 285-295
Author(s):  
Yvonne Chua ◽  
Jake Soriano

Elections are fertile ground for disinformation. The 2019 midterm elections, like the 2016 presidential election, buttress this observation. This ugly side of electoral contests is documented by Tsek.ph, a pioneering collaborative fact-checking initiative launched by three universities and eleven newsrooms specifically for the midterms. Its repository of fact checks provides valuable insights into the nature of electoral disinformation before, during and after the elections. Clearly, electoral disinformation emanates from candidates and supporters alike, on conventional (e.g., speeches and sorties) and digital (e.g., social media) platforms. Its wide range of victims includes the media no less.


Author(s):  
Marco Bastos ◽  
Dan Mercea

In this article, we review our study of 13 493 bot-like Twitter accounts that tweeted during the UK European Union membership referendum debate and disappeared from the platform after the ballot. We discuss the methodological challenges and lessons learned from a study that emerged in a period of increasing weaponization of social media and mounting concerns about information warfare. We address the challenges and shortcomings involved in bot detection, the extent to which disinformation campaigns on social media are effective, valid metrics for user exposure, activation and engagement in the context of disinformation campaigns, unsupervised and supervised posting protocols, along with infrastructure and ethical issues associated with social sciences research based on large-scale social media data. We argue for improving researchers' access to data associated with contentious issues and suggest that social media platforms should offer public application programming interfaces to allow researchers access to content generated on their networks. We conclude with reflections on the relevance of this research agenda to public policy. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations'.


Glimpse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-130
Author(s):  
Sarah Lwahas ◽  

Journalism like many other professions is facing a crucial phase with the emergence of Coronavirus pandemic. The impact of Coronavirus phenomenon is enormous on social and cultural relationships of many communities who depend on the media for information to connect with each other and participate in governance freely. Journalists globally are facing enormous crisis of managing the infodemic of the pandemic streaming particularly from social media; as well as controversies of the media perpetuating disinfodemic or disinformation and distrust in the society. Besides arrests and restrictions of movement, journalists are also under intense threats of losing their jobs, and exacerbated psychological and physical pressures owing to the devastating effects of COVID-19. Using the Social Responsibility theory, that emphasises improved standards of journalism, safeguarding the interests of journalism and journalists among others, and the Agenda setting theory, that controls access to news, information, and entertainment; this research interrogates how journalists from selected states in Northern Nigeria are responding to the challenges of reportage of COVID-19. This research sampled the views of journalists using structured questionnaire administered online and interviewed seven senior journalists holding managerial positions. Findings revealed that journalists are embracing fact checking of the avalanche of information even within familiar sources to verify reports on COVID-19. Similarly, they are deploying digital and multimedia strategies to provide a continuum of media services and sensitive reporting to engage this new infodemic of COVID-19, now globally considered the “new normal”. This research recommends that, since COVID-19 is a novel disease, professionals across countries need to talk with each other, and journalists particularly from Africa and indeed Nigeria; need to put some structure and some science in place, especially in the performance of their jobs, so that professionalism can be sustained without compromising the future of the journalism.


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