Michael James Walsh, Stephanie Alice Baker and Matthew Wade
To respond to the COVID-19 “infodemic” and combat fraud and misinformation about the virus, social media platforms coordinated with government healthcare agencies around the world…
Abstract
Purpose
To respond to the COVID-19 “infodemic” and combat fraud and misinformation about the virus, social media platforms coordinated with government healthcare agencies around the world to elevate authoritative content about the novel coronavirus. These public health authorities included national and global public health organisations, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). In this article, the authors evaluate the effectiveness of this strategy by asking two key questions: (1) Did people engage with authoritative health content on social media? (2) Was this content trusted?
Design/methodology/approach
The authors explore these issues by drawing on data from a global online questionnaire on “Public Trust in Experts” (n = 429) conducted during the initial phase of the pandemic in May 2020, a crucial period when reliable information was urgently required to influence behaviour and minimise harm.
Findings
The authors found that while the majority of those surveyed noticed authoritative health content online, there remained significant issues in terms of Internet users trusting the information shared by government healthcare agencies and public health authorities online.
Originality/value
In what follows, the authors examine the role of trust in implementing this novel public health strategy and assess the capacity for such policies to reduce individual and social harm.
Peer review
The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-12-2021-0655
Details
Keywords
This article aims to explore the impact of new social media on the 2011 English riots.
Abstract
Purpose
This article aims to explore the impact of new social media on the 2011 English riots.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper suggests that discourse on the riots in the news and popular press is obscured by speculation and political rhetoric about the role of social media in catalysing the unrest that overlooks the role of individual agency and misrepresents the emotional dimensions of such forms of collective action.
Findings
In considering the riots to be symptomatic of criminality and austerity, commentators have tended to revive nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century crowd theories to make sense of the unrest, which are unable to account for the effect of new social media on this nascent twenty‐first century phenomenon.
Research limitations/implications
Here, the notion of the “mediated crowd” is introduced to argue that combining emotions research with empirical analysis can provide an innovative account of the relationship between new social media and the type of collective action that took place during the riots. Such a concept challenges orthodox nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century crowd theories that consider crowds to be a corollary of “emotive contagion” in spatial proximity, with “the mediated crowd” mobilised in the twenty‐first century through social networking in both geographic and virtual arenas.
Originality/value
The paper proposes that this original approach provides insight into the particular conditions in which the 2011 English riots emerged, while advancing crowd theory in general.