Health-protective behaviour, social media usage and conspiracy belief during the COVID-19 public health emergency

By D. Allington, B. Duffy, S. Wessely, N. Dhavan, J. Rubin. Psychological Medicine, 2020

665 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Background Social media platforms have long been recognised as major disseminators of health misinformation. Many previous studies have found a negative association between health-protective behaviours and belief in the specific form of misinformation popularly known as ‘conspiracy theory’. Concerns have arisen regarding the spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories on social media. Methods Three questionnaire surveys of social media use, conspiracy beliefs and health-protective behaviours with regard to COVID-19 among UK residents were carried out online, one using a self-selecting sample (N = 949) and two using stratified random samples from a recruited panel (N = 2250, N = 2254). Results All three studies found a negative relationship between COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and COVID-19 health-protective behaviours, and a positive relationship between COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and use of social media as a source of information about COVID-19. Studies 2 and 3 also found a negative relationship between COVID-19 health-protective behaviours and use of social media as a source of information, and Study 3 found a positive relationship between health-protective behaviours and use of broadcast media as a source of information. Conclusions When used as an information source, unregulated social media may present a health risk that is partly but not wholly reducible to their role as disseminators of health-related conspiracy beliefs.

Subfields: Communication, Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6028a96c0291501a912f223e1ffe249a17093445

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. S. van der Linden
2. J. Roozenbeek
3. Thomas Nygren
4. Stephan Lewandowsky
5. Melisa Basol

In Health

1. J. Roozenbeek
2. S. van der Linden

In Sociology and Political Science

1. J. Roozenbeek
2. S. van der Linden
3. A. M. van der Bles
4. A. Freeman
5. S. Dryhurst
6. Gabriel Recchia
7. J. Kerr
8. C. Schneider

Citations in the corpus

• Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, neutral): “For instance, lately and during the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories have been discussed from a public health perspective (Meese et al. 2020; Allington et al. 2020; Freeman et al. 2020).”
• Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world (2020, background): “In addition, while some research is available on the relation between COVID-19 misinformation and key public health behaviours [21,40], existing studies have been criticized for using low-quality convenience samples [46] and a systematic evaluation of how false beliefs about the virus can affect vac”