Examining the interplay among social media news use, misinformation and conspiracy

As an occupational epidemiologist, I have faced some rather strange questions over the past 1.5 years, many of which make me scratch my head attempting to understand the logic. The COVID19 pandemic is forcing us to reconsider how to address workplace health issues, as well as public health issues related to communicable and non-communicable diseases. In fact, we will probably need to re-write our public health texts for the next generation of specialists as we will probably have to face continued mis- and dis-information campaigns, fueled domestically and internationally. This scientific paper looked at social media news use. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation has been circulating on social media and multiple conspiracy theories have since become quite popular. The authors conducted a U.S. national survey for three main purposes. First, they aimed to examine the association between social media news consumption and conspiracy beliefs specific to COVID-19 and general conspiracy beliefs. Second, they investigated the influence of an important moderator, social media news trust, that has been overlooked in prior studies. Third, they proposed a moderated moderation model by including misinformation identification. Their findings show that social media news use was associated with higher conspiracy beliefs, and trust in social media news was found to be a significant moderator of the relationship between social media news use and conspiracy beliefs. Moreover, their findings show that misinformation identification moderated the relationship between social media news use and trust. The need for a focus on trusted, established news sources in health and medicine.