Unpacking Misinfodemic During a Global Health Crisis: A Qualitative Inquiry of Psychosocial Characteristics in Social Media Interactions.

The pervasiveness of health information in social media has led to a modern misinformation crisis, also known as a misinfodemic. Misinfodemics have upended public health activities as clearly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective of this study is to characterize social media content and information sources using theory-driven health behavior and psychology constructs to better understand the motifs of misinformation and their role in the dissemination of health (mis)information in Twitter posts. We analyzed 1,400 randomly selected tweets related to COVID-19 to ascertain four important variables, what is the tweet about (content), how is it structured (linguistic features), who is tweeting (source), and what is the reach of the tweet (dissemination). Results showed there was a significant difference between themes expressed, health beliefs manifested, and observed linguistic patterns in true and false information. Implications for informatics-driven digital health utilities, such as theory-informed knowledge models and context-aware risk communications, are discussed.