Alienating the Polarized: The Predictors of ‘Infodemic Vulnerability’ in Brazil

• In Event: Digital Information Flows and Politics in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 brought a large increase in news consumption across many countries followed by the rise of news avoidance and low trust in Covid-19 news for a significant minority of the population (Nielsen et al., 2020). These people may be particularly vulnerable to being ill-informed about constantly changing measures to mitigate the pandemic, as well as their own wellbeing, given the role of news media in keeping citizens up to date about Covid-19.
For the purposes of this study, ‘infodemic vulnerability’ is defined as the a) lack of news consumption about Covid-19 from news organizations and b) the lack of trust in news organizations about Covid-19 (Nielsen et al., 2020b). This is because those who access news regularly but do not trust it, can still be exposed to trustworthy information through news media, and those who trust news but do not access it can search for trustworthy information if needed. However, those who almost never access news and do not trust it are more vulnerable since they are less likely to have up to date information about a rapidly changing crisis. This definition is informed by a broader academic literature on how people use the news media to stay informed about current affairs (e.g. Curran et al., 2009), as well as by research on health communication suggesting that the lack of trust in authoritative sources can be a fertile ground for the spread of vaccine misinformation (Larson, 2020).
In this study we examine different predictors of infodemic vulnerability in Brazil. We first look at sociodemographic factors given that research has highlighted that lower SES (Ohlsson et al., 2017), women (Toff & Palmer, 2019), and young people (Toff & Kalogeropoulos, 2020) are more likely to tune out of news.
H1) People from disadvantaged socio-demographic backgrounds will be more likely to be 'infodemically vulnerable'.
Other than sociodemographic factors, lower levels of trust in news are related to ideological extremity (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2019) and political ideology (Newman et al., 2021). Other factors related to the lack of news use or trust in news include reliance on non-traditional news sources like social media platforms (Toff & Kalogeropoulos, 2020; Fletcher & Park, 2017; Kalogeropoulos et al., 2019). Given these considerations about factors related to trust in news and news consumption, we ask:
RQ1) What is the relationship between ‘infodemic vulnerability’ and political ideology?
RQ2) What is the relationship between ‘infodemic vulnerability’ and social media use?

Method, Measures, and Preliminary Results
Data for this study was collected in Brazil, one of the most highly affected countries of the Global South by Covid-19 (Our World in Data, 2021), having also faced several political crises due to the handling of pandemic (Rossini & Kalogeropoulos, 2021), contributing to further polarization. The survey was conducted online by research company Ibope between 6-23 July 2020 (n = 2,010). Τo capture parts of the population that are infodemically vulnerable, we used a battery measuring news consumption about Covid-19 and one measure of trust in news organizations for Covid-19 news provision. Overall, we identified that 7% of the online population in Brazil is infodemically vulnerable.

Preliminary results stemming from a logistic regression suggest that (1) the most important factors in predicting infodemic vulnerability were variables related to political orientation and attitudes. Right-wing political orientation was positively and significantly associated with infodemic vulnerability, as well as presidential approval of handling the pandemic. Findings further suggest that (2) sociodemograhic variables matter, but to a lesser extent than political orientation: lower levels of education in Brazil were significantly correlated with infodemic vulnerability, while gender and income were not significant predictors. Last, (3) using social media and messaging applications for Covid-19 information were negatively correlated with infodemic vulnerability in Brazil, suggesting that they could contribute to keeping vulnerable parts of the population above the threshold of infodemic vulnerability.

This in-progress study contributes to a growing literature emphasizing the role of partisanship and social media platforms in the diffusion of crucial Covid-19 information, as well as in formulating new types of informational inequalities, where partisanship could matter more than long-standing social factors. The strong political context surrounding the pandemic, political polarization was instrumental in keeping significant minorities of the population uninformed about the state of the pandemic and the necessary measures to mitigate it, potentially leaving this segment of the population more vulnerable to Covid-19 misinformation.

Authors

• Antonis Kalogeropoulos, University of Liverpool

• Patricia Rossini, University of Glasgow