COVID-19 and fake news: knowledge assessment and discrepancy of social media users in the UAE

Abstract EN

Fake news and misinformation are everywhere nowadays, including news sources and social media.

during the COVID-19 pandemic, people rely on news, especially news coming to them from social media.

the study's objective is to understand why and how people rely on social media sources during the COVID-19 pandemic and what they do with misinformation and fake news related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

in addition to that, the study aims to determine the essential issues and items related to COVID-19 among social media users.

the study will be relying on several mass communication theoretical concepts, such as agenda-setting theory and uses and gratifications theory.

the study’s methods will include a structured online survey distributed among social media users to understand the reasons for their consumption of news on COVID-19 and their level of trust in social media news.

data showed that almost 64% of the respondents get their COVID-19 news from social media in a daily basis.

while in regards of the perception of participants concerning the fake news circulating in social media about COVID-19 pandemic, results showed that almost half (46%) of the respondents think that information shared about the number of infections and death due to COVID-19 sometimes were fake and misinformation.

in addition to that, data shows that more than half (87%) of the participants claimed that they check for accuracy before sharing any news on social media.