Medical workers transport a COVID-19 patient from an ambulance at Seoul Medical Center in Seoul on March 25, 2022. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, March 31 (Korea Bizwire) – Countries with lower national income are more prone to believing in COVID-19-related fake news, a study showed Wednesday.
The Institute for Basic Science’s Data Science Group led by Cha Meeyoung, a professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), analyzed data collected from 40 countries as part of the ‘facts before rumors’ campaign, which showed that only 16.7 percent of internet users from economically well-off states believed that fake news was true.
In contrast, 33.3 percent of netizens from a number of developing states believed in the fake news.
“The lower the national income, the higher the damage incurred by the so-called infodemic” the research team said.
In 2020, the World Health Organization warned that the COVID-19 outbreak has sparked an infodemic — an overwhelming amount of information online, usually false news or rumors.
The study also showed that netizens from poorer countries were far more exposed to fake news about COVID-19.
In Sweden and Finland, both highly advanced economic powers, only 40 percent of netizens said they had seen false news about the pandemic. In Cameroon and the Philippines, developing countries, the rates were close to 60 percent.
Supposing that the rate of internet usage is constant across the world, netizens from countries with lower national income are more likely to run into lower quality, fake information online, the research team said.
In the earlier stages of the pandemic era when vaccines and medicines were lacking, infodemics triggered massive damage by spreading false methods of treatment or prevention.
Even now, the impact of the infodemic can be seen through anti-vaccine protests and severe mistrust of state medical authorities, the research team said.
H. M. Kang (hmkang@koreabizwire.com)
