• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.82-91
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• 2023

In 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began in full-scale, the WHO Director-General warned of the dangers of an infodemic. The infodemic is a phenomenon in which false information spreads rapidly like an epidemic and causes chaos, and it was noted that the COVID-19 pandemic is not just limited to health problems, but also linked to a variety of issues such as human rights, economic inequality, various discrimination, hate speech, fake news, global governance etc. In the field of education, it is necessary to think about how to connect this global situation with school classes. Accordingly, this study suggested the direction for global citizenship education by analyzing how the infodemic spreads on Korean social media with the case of the recent global COVID-19 pandemic. According to the research results, the rate of negative emotions was higher than positive ones in the emotions that generate infodemic, while anxiety and anger were focused among negative emotions. In addition, the infodemic tended to spread widely with the feelings of anger rather than anxiety, and the feelings of anger led to advocating aggressive policies against certain country and regions. Therefore, global citizenship education is required to focus on a sense of duty and responsibility as a citizen, not on the level of national identity based on an exclusive sense of belonging. Furthermore, global citizenship education needs to lead to presenting a blueprint for education in a way that can enhance the awareness of the global community for joint response to global challenges and realize common prosperity based on sustainability and justice.

• Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.59-72
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• 2022

This text discusses elements and characteristics of contemporary informational reality, that is, the ways of producing, circulating, organizing, using, and appropriating information in the current context. Initially, seven terms and concepts used to describe this reality are discussed: fake news, false testimonials, hate speech, scientific negationism, disinformation, post-truth, and infodemic. Next, an attempt is made to present a framework for such phenomena as an object of study in information science. Therefore, this scenario is characterized based on the three main models of information science study: physical, cognitive, and social. The contribution of each of them to the study of contemporary informational reality is analyzed, identifying aspects such as the bubble effect, clickbaits, confirmation bias, cults of amateurism, and post-truth culture. Finally, it presents the discussion of a possible veritistic turn in the field, in order to think about elements not covered so far by information science in its task and challenge of producing adequate understanding and diagnoses of current phenomena. In conclusion, it is argued that only accurate and comprehensive diagnoses of such phenomena will allow information science to develop services and systems capable of combating their harmful effects.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.311-312
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• 2020

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.945-963
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• 2022

With the widespread use of social media, online social platforms like Twitter have become a place of rapid dissemination of information-both accurate and inaccurate. After the COVID-19 outbreak, the overabundance of fake information and rumours on online social platforms about the COVID-19 pandemic has spread over society as quickly as the virus itself. As a result, fake news poses a significant threat to effective virus response by negatively affecting people's willingness to follow the proper public health guidelines and protocols, which makes it important to identify fake information from online platforms for the public interest. In this research, we introduce an approach to detect fake news using deep learning techniques, which outperform traditional machine learning techniques with a 93.1% accuracy. We then investigate the content differences between real and fake news by applying topic modeling and linguistic analysis. Our results show that topics on Politics and Government services are most common in fake news. In addition, we found that fake news has lower analytic and authenticity scores than real news. With the findings, we discuss important academic and practical implications of the study.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.41-50
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• 2021

As COVID-19 spread widely, and rapidly, the number of misinformation is also increasing, which WHO has referred to this phenomenon as "Infodemic". The purpose of this research is to develop detection and rectification of COVID-19 misinformation based on Open-domain QA system and text similarity. 9 testing conditions were used in this model. For open-domain QA system, 6 conditions were applied using three different types of dataset types, scientific, social media, and news, both datasets, and two different methods of choosing the answer, choosing the top answer generated from the QA system and voting from the top three answers generated from QA system. The other 3 conditions were the Closed-Domain QA system with different dataset types. The best results from the testing model were 76% using all datasets with voting from the top 3 answers outperforming by 16% from the closed-domain model.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.163-171
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• 2021

This study aimed to investigate the main characteristics of the COVID-19 vaccine-related videos spread on YouTube and differences in user responses in the infodemic situation caused by COVID-19. As a result of content analysis of 579 videos related to the COVID-19 vaccine, it was found that all of the false information was written by individual channels. Institutions, organizations, media companies, and government channels reported spread of false information as well as fact-oriented reporting. The progressive channel had a high percentage of positive sentiment in favor of vaccination, and the conservative channel had a high percentage of negative emotion against vaccination. After the vaccination started, the number of videos on government channels increased, and it was found that the number of videos with positive emotions increased. Results of regression analysis of video characteristics that affect the number of likes indicated that personal expert videos and videos from progressive channels received more likes. Combining the research results, we propose a plan to promote government policies regarding the COVID-19 vaccine using social media.

• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.53-74
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• 2024

The proliferation of health misinformation gained momentum amidst the outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). People stuck in their homes, without work pressure, regardless of health concerns towards personal, family, or peer groups, consistently demanded information. People became engaged with misinformation while attempting to find health information content. This study used the content analysis method and analyzed 1,154 misinformation stories from four prominent signatories of the International Fact-Checking Network during the pandemic. The study finds the five main categories of misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. These are 1) the severity of the virus, 2) cure, prevention, and treatment, 3) myths and rumors about vaccines, 4) health authorities' guidelines, and 5) personal and social impacts. Various sub-categories supported the content characteristics of these categories. The study also analyzed the emotional valence of health misinformation. It was found that misinformation containing negative sentiments got higher engagement during the pandemic. Positive and neutral sentiment misinformation has less reach. Surprise, fear, and anger/aggressive emotions highly affected people during the pandemic; in general, people and social media users warning people to safeguard themselves from COVID-19 and creating a confusing state were found as the primary motivation behind the propagation of misinformation. The present study offers valuable perspectives on the mechanisms underlying the spread of health-related misinformation amidst the COVID-19 outbreak. It highlights the significance of discerning the accuracy of information and the feelings it conveys in minimizing the adverse effects on the well-being of public health.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.26 no.8
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• pp.91-101
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• 2021

This paper intends to draw implications for preparing for Post-Corona in the health field and policy fields as the global pandemic is experienced due to COVID-19. The purpose of this study is to analyze the news and trends of media companies through temporal analysis of the three infectious diseases, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), in which the domestic infectious disease preventive system was active throughout the first year of the outbreak. To this end, by using the news analysis program of the Korea Press Foundation 'Big Kinds', the number of news articles per year was digitized based on the period when each infectious disease had an impact on Korea, and major trends were implemented and analyzed in a word cloud. As a result of the analysis, the number of articles related to infectious diseases peaked when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a warning and (suspicious) confirmed cases occurred. According to keyword and word cloud analysis, 'infectious disease outbreak and major epidemic areas', 'prevention authorities', and 'disease information and confirmed patient information' were found to be the main common features, and differences were derived from the three infectious diseases. In addition, the current status of the infodemic was identified by performing word cloud analysis on information in uncertainty. The results of this study are significant in that they were able to derive the roles of the health authorities and the media that should be preceded in the event of a new disease epidemic through previously experienced infectious diseases, and areas to be rearranged.