Search

The Pan American Health Organization/ World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) Anti-Infodemic Virtual Center for the Americas (AIVCA) is a project led by the Department of Evidence and Intelligence for Action in Health, PAHO and the Center for Health Informatics, PAHO/WHO Collaborating Center on Information Systems for Health, at the University of Illinois, with the participation of PAHO staff and consultants across the region. Its goal is to develop a set of tools--pairing AI with human judgment--to help ministries of health and related health institutions respond to infodemics. Public health officials will learn about emerging threats detected by the center and get recommendations on how to respond. The virtual center is structured with three parallel teams: detection, evidence, and response. The detection team will employ a mixture of advanced search queries, machine learning, and other AI techniques to sift through more than 800 million new public social media posts per day to identify emerging infodemic threats in both English and Spanish. The evidence team will use the EasySearch federated search engine backed by AI, PAHO's knowledge management team, and the Librarian Reserve Corps to identify the most relevant authoritative sources. The response team will use a design approach to communicate recommended response strategies based on behavioural science, storytelling, and information design approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. To describe the characteristics of fake news about COVID-19 disseminated in Brazil from January to June 2020. Method. The fake news recorded until 30 June 2020 in two websites (Globo Corporation website G1 and Ministry of Health) were collected and categorized according to their content. From each piece of fake news, the following information was extracted: publication date, title, channel (e.g., WhatsApp), format (text, photo, video), and website in which it was recorded. Terms were selected from fake news titles for analysis in Google Trends to determine whether the number of searches using the selected terms had increased after the fake news appeared. The Brazilian regions with the highest percent increase in searches using the terms were also identified. Results. In the two websites, 329 fake news about COVID-19 were retrieved. Most fake news were spread through WhatsApp and Facebook. The most frequent thematic categories were: politics (20.1%), epidemiology and statistics (e.g., proportion of cases and deaths) (19.5%), and prevention (16.1%). According to Google Trends, the number of searches using the terms retrieved from the fake news increased 34.3% during the period studied. The largest increase was recorded in the Southeast (45.1%) and the Northeast (27.8%). Conclusions. The fake news spread during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil were characterized by political content as well as misinformation about the number of cases and deaths and about prevention measures and treatment. The main dissemination channels were WhatsApp and Facebook, with the use of messages, images, and videos, with greater reach in the Southeast and Northeast of Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, information spread via multiple platforms, including social networks and Internet search engines. This report analyzes Twitter tweets, Facebook posts, and Google trends, as well as several other Internet resources, from March - November 2014. Understanding the types of discussions, social behaviors, feelings expressed, and information shared during the Ebola outbreak can help health organizations improve communication interventions and avert misinformation and panic during health emergencies. In all, 6 422 170 tweets, 83 Facebook posts, and Google search trends were integrated with 63 chronological Ebola-related events. Events that prompted a surge in tweets using #ebola were related to new cases of infection or the entry of the disease into a new geographic area. Most tweets were re-tweets of information provided by news agencies and official health organizations. Events related to new infections and deaths seemed to correlate with an increase of words that express fear. Google results concurred with Twitter and Facebook. Data from social media activity can be used to form hypotheses about how the public responds to and behaves during public health events, prompting health organizations to adopt new strategies for communications interventions. Furthermore, a spike in activity around a topic can be used as a surveillance technique to signal to health authorities that an outbreak may be underway. It is also recommended that news agencies, which engage with the public most often, consider content review by health experts as part of their health communications process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]