Who Shares COVID Conspiracies Online? Evidence from Five Countries

• In Event: COVID Communication and Politics

Abstract

The novel coronavirus pandemic has spurred research on the prevalence of misinformation and belief in conspiracy theories related to COVID among the public, as well as sources of these attitudes. Social scientists have examined the prevalence of COVID related misinformation in the media environment (Motta et al, 2020; Roozenbeek et al, 2020), and social media in particular have been identified as an important venue for the spread of misinformation (Mitchell et al., 2020; Papakyriakopoulos et al. 2020). Furthermore, people who get their news on social media have been found to be more misinformed about basic facts surrounding COVID-19 (Baum et al., 2020; Bridgman et al., 2020). This misinformation has been shown to predict COVID related behaviors, such as not social distancing and COVID vaccine hesitancy (Romer and Hall Jamieson, 2020; Gadarian et al., 2020). This work has important implications for public health professionals and anyone who cares about correcting COVID misinformation. At the same time, there has been considerably less focus on understanding the determinants of who shares misinformation online and for what purpose.

In this paper, we focus on addressing two gaps in this literature. First, we aim to explain why people share COVID-19 related conspiracies on their social media feeds. Current work highlights the importance of trust in relevant institutions, news media diet, as well as populism, as some of the central determinants of COVID conspiracy beliefs (Uscinski et al, 2020; Stecula and Pickup, 2020). We build on these models to understand which people choose to share these conspiracies with their followers on social media. Second, we aim to expand the scope of the existing work beyond the United States. Researchers have focused extensively on the US, but the global nature of the pandemic, and the international nature of the information environment coupled with cross-national appeal of COVID conspiracies presents a unique opportunity to explore the extent to which the factors driving social media sharing behavior are universal. To achieve these research aims, we collected data on large, nationally representative samples from five countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom through surveys conducted in July of 2020.

Authors

• Mark A. Pickup, Simon Fraser University

• Dominik Andrzej Stecula, Colorado State University

• Clifton van der Linden, McMaster University