Reference no: EM133270097

Task 1. Explain some factors that prevent people from having access to correct and reliable information about important issues that affect them, such as public health.

Task 2. To what extent has information about COVID-19 been more accessible to citizens of Pacific Island Countries than would have been possible before we had social media?

Kant et al. (2021)

The widespread increase of COVID-19 and the resultant global pandemic has become a focus of intense social media discourse with Twitter reporting a COVID-19 related tweet every millisecond and the hashtag #coronavirus surging to become the second most used in 2020 (Cinelli et al., 2020; Josephson & Lambe, 2020). Unfortunately, false, and misleading information about COVID-19, potentially dangerous treatments, and eventual vaccination continue to grow on social media platforms. 'Infodemic' was the subject of an early COVID-19 study by Cinelli et al. (2020), who used epidemic modelling to the spread of information on multiple platforms to determine fundamental reproduction numbers for the 'transmissibility' of postings on each platform. Additionally, irrespective of platform, there were no significant differences between the disseminating patterns of information considered questionable compared with reliable ones. There is also growing worry that vaccine-related conversations are not confined to legitimate human accounts. Broniatowski et al. (2018) looked at how accounts belonging to robots (software programmes which create automated material) and trolls (internet accounts that falsify the user's identity and whose goal is to provoke conflict) operate on Twitter.

It is worth noting that the current trends in COVID-19 vaccine discourse bear a striking similarity to historical trends. Vaccine discourse on social media has had time to evolve, with such trends in discourse often coinciding with real-world public health events (Gunaratne, Coomes, & Haghbayan, 2019). For instance, Gunaratne et al. (2019) demonstrated that anti-vaccine discourse on Twitter experienced a significant surge in 2015, coinciding with the 2014-2015 measles outbreak, publication of the anti-vaccine book Vaccine Whistleblower (#cdcwhistleblower), and the release of the film Vaxxed (#vaxxed). It also demonstrates that pro and anti-vaccine content may also naturally disseminate into distinct communities, possibly due to self-selection on social media, further enhanced by online algorithms, amalgamating like-minded communities to contrasting online information and content. For example, anti-vaccine content on Twitter largely coalesced into a community centred around #cdcwhistleblower and #vaxxed proponents, while pro-vaccine content primarily centred around the hashtag #vaccineswork (Gunaratne et al., 2019; Ortiz-Ospina, 2019). Content appears to transfer between users who share similar sentiments regarding vaccination but rarely across those with differing opinions, suggesting the structure of such platforms may give the illusion of debate, but in practice mainly serves to reinforce previously held opinions rather than the consideration of new ones (Yuan, Schuchard, and Crooks, 2019). Such ideological isolation may limit the ability of public health to promote vaccination on social media (Yuan et al., 2019).