Rethinking Fake News: Disinformation and Ideology during the time of COVID-19 Global Pandemic

Abstract

Digital media and citizen journalism has escalated the infiltration of fake news attempting to create a post truth society (Lazer et al., 2018). The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a surge of misinformation leading to anti-mask, anti-vaccine and anti-5G protests on a global scale. Although the term ‘misinformation’ has been generalized in media and scholarly work, there is a fundamental difference between how misinformation impacts society, compared to more strategically planned disinformation attacks. In this study we explore the ideological constructs of citizens towards acceptance or rejection of disinformation during the heightened time of a COVID-19 global health crisis. Our analysis follows two specific disinformation propagandas evaluated through social network analysis of Twitter data in addition to qualitative insights generated from tweets and in-depth interviews.