The development of the internet as we know it resulted in multiple benefits for society, opportunities to share convictions and opinions. Unfortunately, it represents a place for conspiracy theories, disinformation and dissemination of untruthful information. In the first weeks of 2020, when the coronavirus outbreak was centered in China, few people had been diagnosedin other countries. At this time, the coverage of the epidemic in international media was small. However, once it became clear that the virus was expanding, media coverage increased and with it the spread of panic.
The dissemination and creation of fake news through social networks represents a danger to society, the economic system and democracy [1]. The circulation of fake news during a health crisis is often motivated by the desire to suppress or distort key official messages for recovery. Almost half of the health content posted on social networks contains misinformation since, one of the most salient characteristics of fake news is that it has a narrative that has a detrimental impact [2] with fear or mistrust, which can generate serious problems in the short, medium and long terms [3]. Kabha's research [11] include several impacts from the dissemination of misinformation to the misuse of drugs to cure the disease. Health misinformation about vaccines were also verycommon (43%) [5]. According to the review of Gabarron y Win [6], of the 22 investigations, 11 did not categorize the type of COVID-19-related misinformation, 9 described specific misinformation myths, and 2 reported sarcasm or humor related to COVID-19. But, susceptibility to interact with fake news is independent of the individual educational level of each study subject.
Major media platforms contain mainly fake news and during the current pandemic generated many concerns regarding public health and communication. According to studies by Alí [1], Córdova [3] and Rocha [7], there is a strong significant correlation between social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube and Twitter) and fake news.
The spread of rumors, especially about government performance, on social media is clearly of concern [8], and artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning techniques are currently being applied to detect fake news before its spread via social networks on covid-19.
However, in reviews done so far, the benefits of media and digital literacy, related to automated fake news detection practices, are not explained in detail. Therefore, the objective of this review is to conduct a review in relation to fake news, discussing the characteristics of the infodemic, media/digital literacy and the impact of this for society, as well as mechanisms to detect and stop fake news about covid-19 in social networks.
For the reporting of this systematic review, the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) 2020 standards are applied to identify eligibility criteria, sources of information, search strategy, selection process, data collection process, and data list.
For the present case, 3 relevant databases were chosen for the study of the identification of fake news. One digital library (IEEE Xplore) and two documentary databases (Scopus and Web of Science) were selected. All index impact articles. And while all of them show relevant results in the field of Computer Science, important for the detection of fake news; Scopus and WoS also show relevant information for social sciences. SEARCH STRING (("Fake News" OR "Media misinformation" OR Misinformation OR Rumors OR Disinformation) AND ("Social Media" OR "Social Network" OR "Online News" OR Twitter OR Facebook OR Whatsapp) AND ("COVID-19" OR covid OR coronavirus OR quarantine OR pandemic)))
EXCLUSION CRITERIA Articles published in scientific journals between January 2020 and January 2022.
The text of the article is not available for reading.
Publications indexed in the databases we have established.
The article is written in a language other than English or Spanish.
The text of the article must be available for reading. Proposals that will analyze and employ mechanisms to detect and/or stop fake news in social networks.
Repeated documents, documents written in a language other than English or Spanish, inaccessible documents, and documents published before 2020. It was evaluated whether the artisan women are complying with the general pre-ven-tive measures imposed by the Peruvian state, which are as follows: carrying out clean-ing and disinfecting process on surroundings, furniture, tools, and equipment among other inert surfaces to ensure they are free of COVID-19; ensuring the quanti-ty and lo-cation of hand washing points (water, liquid soap or gel) and alcohol for the artisan's use; implementing the correct use of double surgical masks or a KN 95 and respecting the social distance of at least 1 meter.
The results obtained show that 93.3% of artisan women have been vaccinated against COVID-19, which is the most effective prevention measure worldwide (see Table 2).
In terms of compliance with the general preventive measures, 70% of the artisan women do not comply or are at a beginner level with the health protocols and 30% of the artisan women are in the process, meaning that in some cases they use alcohol when in contact with another person, they clean and disinfect their work tools and use a surgical mask. Concerning compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures in the production pro-cess and the sale of artisan work, three stages have been identified: Before the activity-artisan work production process (stage 1); at the sale of artisan work in workshops, stalls, or artisan stores (stage 2) and after the artisan activity (stage 3), as shown in Table 3.
In compliance with stage 1, 70% of the artisan women do not comply or are in the pro-cess of beginning to comply with the preventive measures, with the lowest indicators being when more than two artisans meet to produce their work, they do not keep social distance and do not use double surgical masks or a KN 95 with 80% and 83.3%, respectively.
Concerning compliance with stage 2-regarding the sale of artisan work in the work-shop, stall, or store-100% of the artisan women do not comply with the prevention measures, for tourism revival and are not prepared to serve the public. Only 16.7% of the artisan women have installed or use a hand sanitizing point at the entrance of the workshop, stall, or store. A hand disinfection point has been installed or used at the entrance of the workshop, stall, or craft store by 7% of artisan women; only 3.3% use electronic payment methods or digital wallets as most of them are afraid of electronic transactions and 100% have not placed signs that promote care and measures to pre-vent COVID 19.
In compliance with stage 3, 76.7% of the artisan women do not comply or are in the process of beginning to comply with the preventive measures after carrying out their activities; only 23.3% store raw materials and consumables in the storage area, discard the containers (bags, paper, etc.) and disinfect the area; 83.3% of the artisan women wash and disinfect their hands at the end of the operation.
This pandemic generated by covid-19 is an important event that brings disinformation generating two basic problems for public safety: Propagation of misinformation and also the so-called infodemic. Disinformation is false or incorrect information in overabundance that makes it difficult for people to find reliable sources when they need them according to WHO [9]. Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by WHO on March 11, 2020 and before that the disinformation in social networks about it was already causing damage worldwide, so the threat of the infodemic was announced in February 2020 at the Munich security conference. Marín (2021) [10], explains that there are three types of informative context: weak epistemic (information is not always shared to inform), strong normative (prescriptive or evaluative statements) and strong emotional (emotional manipulation in the news), in each one, but especially the strong emotional context, social networks play a fundamental role in exploring people's behaviors. In a crisis context the amount of information overwhelms the public generating attention fatigue that affects health-related behaviors and emotional responses such as fear, sadness, nervousness, confusion, amusement, anxiety that surface distrust and competition between information sources reducing the dissemination useful health information generating stress and discouragement, affecting the emotional health of the recipients, there being a significant positive statistical correlation between social networks and the spread of panic about COVID-19. This could be influenced by demographic and generational characteristics such as age and the context in which the people receiving the information analyze it. For example, the study by Soleymani, et al (2021) [12] (n=24), explained that everyone had a specific attitude towards the crisis, among these, many people developed the illusion of being infected by the coronavirus when hearing news about patients and, especially, their deaths. In addition, emotional language can help the success of, for example: (vaccination campaigns, distribution of information, and decrease in the spread of fake news). Therefore, the researchers agree that education could increase trust and emphasize public health messages with emotionally relevant and science-based content. It was possible to identify that the social network Twitter predominated among the chosen documents appearing in 6 articles [13] The discussion on social networks has been affected, dramatically increasing topics about COVID or related topics. The most recurrent topic concerning coronavirus on YouTube and Tiktok was prevention. Due to the crisis, economy was also another quite searched topic as is the case in India [13], and that of Twitter where: "company", "stocks", "economy/economic", "Nasdaq", "wall street" were the most searched terms; but not that of Tiktok where it was unpopular [17]. Disinformation about coronavirus was also quite widespread. In Tiktok it was identified that 27% of the videos had incorrect information about . On twitter, the following were used: 'fake news', 'circulating on social', 'socialnetwork', 'social media' and 'circulating' for misinformation; 'world health organization' 'ministry of health' 'media briefing' for fabricated information; and 'latest information' and 'situation report' for partially false information [22]. In Northern, Western and Southern Europe, words associated with disinformation such as the effects of technological advances were used (5G) In Spanish words like 'plandemic' or 'coronatimo' were widely used to discredit the coronavirus [15]. And on twitter in English words like #vaccineskill and #vaccinesharm to discredit vaccines. [25] On the other hand, the sources most used by people to get information about the pandemic were social networks, both in studies done in Spain, Palestine and Iran. Within them it was found that both YouTube and Twitter the most prevalent sources of information about COVID were official news media [21], [26]. In comparison on both Instagram and Tiktok where the highest amount were produced by public accounts; 67.1% [23] and 96% [22] of total posts respectively. These accounts are likely to use scientific expertise strategically to reinforce one's own pre-existing evaluative opinions [10] and contrary to network consumption, trustworthiness in news shared on these media is quite reduced in generation Z. In Iran likewise individuals stated that pieces of information are disseminated anonymously and cannot be easily trusted, thus stating that it is necessary to validate such information [12], and traditional, alternative media and social networks themselves are the sources of authority attributed in 84.3% of cases. [15] (Soleymani et al., 2021) [12], describes that media literacy of people decreases the counterproductive impact of disinformation and the spread of false news, a tool that improves its effectiveness when coordinated with the media, educators and governmental institutions [27]. Moore & Hancock [28] present media literacy as an instrument of well-being for older adults, since decreasing their relationship with fake news favors their media learning, allowing them to avoid possible attacks on their emotional stability and interaction in social networks. Media literacy maintains the same objective, to be seen as a tool to fight against fake news and the resilient role of education, as it seeks to enable people to make correct use of information resources and avoid disinformation [12].
Currently, studies are applying artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to detect fake news before it spreads via social networks and in April 2020, the Facebook platform managed to eliminate approximately fifty million publications related to COVID-19, as these were classified as fake news through the application of NLP methods based on automated learning. As well as conducting surveys to collect responses, give criteria for credibility, conformability, reliability and transferability of information. However, one thing that stands out is the fine line between the task of deleting accounts, suspending users or removing messages, and maintaining freedom of expression, which means that the design of the rules of use is always one step behind the conversation on social networks. Therefore, interventions by the relevant authorities can exploit the positive power of social networks to distribute accurate information from primary and reliable sources.
The findings indicate that most of the users of social networks accept false information as they feel insufficient knowledge and irrelevant experience in the subjects proposed in the networks. The most effective methods and materials with respect to differentiating fake news from real news [29], the optimal deep learning performance classifiers are, GRU (Closed Recurrent Units), LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory), RNN (Recurrent Neural Network, and offer results of discarding fake news in 86.12%. on the other hand, methods used by a large part of researchers in this regard is verification by PLS-SEM analysis technique, rumor refutation and through a crawler.
This pandemic generated by covid-19 is an important event that brings disinformation generating basic problems for public safety. The dissemination and creation of false news through social networks represents a danger to society, the economic system and democracy [1] because it fuels panic among people and discredits the scientific community in the eyes of public opinion [7] a point that is reinforced by our study, since, for most of the articles analyzed it was considered that in times of crisis the amount of information affects health-related behaviors and emotional responses such as fear, sadness, nervousness, confusion, anxiety that bring out mistrust reducing the dissemination of useful health information generating stress and discouragement, affecting the emotional health of the recipients, there being a positive statistical correlation between social networks and the spread of panic about COVID-19.
Within the three types of informational context: weak epistemic, strong normative and strong emotional, in each, but especially the strong emotional context, social networks play a fundamental role in exploring user behaviors, as they are generally used to manipulate people, being the main media platforms disseminators of fake news generating many concerns regarding public health and communication.
According to studies by Alí [1], Córdova [3] and Rocha [7], there is a strong significant correlation between social network platforms (Facebook, YouTube and Twitter) and fake news. However, in this study, although the correlation between these platforms and NFs is proven, it should be noted that the proportions according to the analyzed articles are as follows: the social network Twitter predominated among the chosen papers appearing in 6 articles, followed by Facebook with participation in 2 articles; while WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, Weibo and Tik-Tok appeared in only one article respectively.
According to the analysis of Pian et al, (2021) [4] the use of social media, the low level of eHealth literacy and the fast publication process and preprint service are identified as the main causes of the infodemic. Hypothesis that is reinforced, but complemented in an explanatory way in the analysis of this study, which highlights that media literacy maintains the objective of being seen as a tool to fight against fake news and the resilient role of education, as it generates a significant change seeking that people can make a correct use of information resources validating and through praxis avoid disinformation [12].
The results of this research include various impacts from small repercussions, such as the spread or viralization of misinformation to the misuse of drugs to cure the disease. Health misinformation about vaccines was also very common. But, the susceptibility to interact with FN is independent of the individual educational level of each study subject as they explained [6]. However, it is stated according to the results of the 30 articles analyzed that demographic and generational characteristic such as age and the context where the persons receiving the information analyze it could also influence. For example, the study of Soleymani (2021) [12] (n=24), explains that each one had a specific attitude towards the crisis, especially about conspiracy theories.
Currently, artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning techniques are being applied to be able to detect fake news before its propagation via social networks on covid-19 [3] and [8]. However, for the results of our study not only natural language processing (NLP) was considered, but in much of the research they use and recommend the improvement of GRU, LSTM, RNN and PLS-SEM analysis strategies. As well as conducting surveys to collect responses, give criteria of credibility, conformability, reliability and transferability of information, highlighting the fine line between the verification of information and maintaining freedom of expression.
This analysis has again highlighted the dangers and consequences that fake news presents to humanity. Infodemic is false or incorrect information in overabundance that makes it difficult for people to find reliable sources when they need them (WHO, 2020) in such a massive way that it is categorized as an endemic evil. The causes of misinformation are usually associated with low rates of media and digital literacy, which in turn makes it difficult for people to distinguish between real or fictitious health information, being manipulated. Therefore, we conclude by highlighting the need for critical attention on the part of governments and corresponding authorities in crisis communication and misinformation, especially for studies focused on public health crises, because as the infodemic of contradictory news continues to massify, real and timely information cannot be clearly communicated. The three informational contexts (epistemic, normative and emotional) should be considered, together with media education to increase trust and emphasize public health messages with emotionally relevant and scientifically based content on the part of the population. Finally, although the knowledge of NF is well studied, it is recommended to continue paying attention to the subject matter that harms public health and safety and to continue conducting research that will allow 100% effective recognition and elimination of untruthful information in social networks.