Social Media And The Spread Of Misinformation Infectious And A Threat

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 3, 2025, 2:55 PM

social media and the spread of misinformation infectious and a threat

Misinformation has been identified as a major threat to society and public health. Social media significantly contributes to the spread of misinformation and has a global reach. Health misinformation has a range of adverse outcomes, including influencing individuals' decisions (e.g. choosing not to vaccinate), and the erosion of trust in authoritative institutions. There are many interrelated causes of the misinformation problem, including the ability of non-experts to rapidly post information, the influence of bots and social media algorithms. Equally, the global nature of social media, limited commitment for action from social media giants, and rapid technological advancements hamper progress for improving information quality and accuracy in this setting.

In short, it is a problem that requires a constellation of synergistic actions aimed at social media users, content creators, companies, and governments. A public health approach to social media-based misinformation that includes tertiary, secondary, and primary prevention may help address immediate impacts, long-term consequences, and root causes of misinformation. Tertiary prevention to 'treat' this problem involves increased monitoring, misinformation debunking, and warning labels on social media posts that are at a high risk of containing misinformation. Secondary prevention strategies include nudging interventions (e.g. prompts about preventing misinformation that appear when sharing content) and education to build media and information literacy. Finally, there is an urgent need for primary prevention, including systems-level changes to address key mechanisms of misinformation and international law to regulate the social media industry.

Anything less means misinformation-and its societal consequences-will continue to spread. Keywords: digital policy; disinformation; health information; misinformation; social media. © The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press. Furthermore, social media organizations need to provide corrections to misinformation and point out that information may be wrong or misleading. Second, the findings highlight the importance of media literacy education (Chen et al., 2022; Fendt et al., 2023).

These media literacy programs should promote critical thinking skills and provide concrete strategies and techniques individuals can deploy for fact-checking and verifying information. A March 2025 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Health Promotion International warned that the spread of misinformation continues to increase, and it has been identified as a significant threat to society and public... Social media also enabled misinformation to have a global reach, the study's authors warned. "There are many interrelated causes of the misinformation problem, including the ability of non-experts to rapidly post information, the influence of bots and social media algorithms. Equally, the global nature of social media, limited commitment for action from social media giants, and rapid technological advancements hamper progress for improving information quality and accuracy in this setting," the study's abstract stated. This isn't good news, but it also shouldn't really be news.

The problem of social media spreading misinformation has been known for years. "The cat is out of the bag on online misinformation," explained James Bailey, professor of business at The George Washington School of Business. "Yet good people continue to believe whatever they read in social media. It is not what they read that they believe, but what they read that they want to believe." Bailey creates this to the power of the written word, which he suggested is so powerful that even when one knows words might be false, incredulity and affirmation blur the cat wiggling out of... The irony is that it is accepted that the tabloids found in the grocery store checkout aisle are often made-up or greatly exaggerated.

Scientific Reports volume 15, Article number: 34740 (2025) Cite this article In today’s digital era, the internet offers unprecedented access to information, but it also accelerates the spread of misinformation. Nowhere is this more problematic than in public health, as the COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated. Misinformation can erode trust in science and health authorities, leading people to disregard expert guidance and adopt unverified treatments that endanger population health. We examine how misinformation alters the course of an infectious disease outbreak by modeling the simultaneous uptake of preventive measures and engagement in harmful behaviors. The model captures the competing influences of accurate information and misinformation on individual decision making.

Our results show that even a modest influx of misinformation can greatly amplify disease transmission, deepening the epidemic’s severity. These findings highlight the urgent need for robust strategies to curb misinformation and support public health interventions during health crises. The exponential growth of the internet has dramatically expanded channels for disseminating information, amplifying both reliable reporting and false or misleading content1,2. Here, we define factual information as evidence-consistent guidance and misinformation as an umbrella term for claims that contradict the best available evidence at the time of sharing, irrespective of intent2. The stakes of spreading misinformation become particularly high in public health contexts, where access to reliable information is paramount, especially concerning infectious disease outbreaks. This scenario unfolds within a complex web of dynamics heavily influenced by human behavior, which in turn is shaped by the information that individuals receive, primarily through mass media, the internet, and social networks3.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to “infodemics”, as defined by the World Health Organization: an overwhelming mix of accurate and misleading information flooding digital platforms and social media4,5. This phenomenon illustrates the dual impact of digital information on public health crisis management. Specifically, the spread of misinformation on COVID-19, including baseless treatments, speculative ideas, and conspiracy theories6,7,8, highlights the substantial public health risks posed by misinformation. Therefore, the role of the internet and social networks in distributing information presents a paradox, as they have the power to either dampen or intensify the spread of infectious diseases9. To elucidate the impact of misinformation during health crises, such as infectious disease outbreaks, our research examines the dynamics of disease transmission among human populations. We emphasize the dual role of factual information and misinformation, which can respectively foster preventive or harmful behaviors.

Our approach involves a SEIRD compartmental model embedded in an Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) framework, featuring mechanisms for information decay and differentiating between factual information and misinformation. Furthermore, it incorporates behavioral responses, classified as either preventative or harmful. Through this framework, our objective is to analyze the impact of disseminating both factual information and misinformation on the spread of an infectious disease. Not long ago, I spoke with a public health official who worked in Florida during their horrific Delta wave. She told me that 27 children died there during that time, and spontaneously volunteered that many people around her claimed that RSV was to blame, not COVID. She had no idea where that pernicious myth originated.

In contrast, I knew exactly where that noxious tidbit of misinformation came from. In August 2021, as the Delta variant ripped through much of the country, Dr. Tracy Hoeg looked at squiggly lines on a graph and wondered aloud on Twitter if incompetent pediatricians were unable to distinguish between the two viruses. I wrote about her Tweet at the time, not just because it was absurd- yes, pediatricians can test for RSV and COVID- but also because her post gained traction, as did it’s author. Had 10 people seen it, I wouldn’t have bothered. However, online influencers propagated her myth, and as I would later learn, it influenced the real world in significant ways.

There are countless other such examples. However, this Florida public health official had no clue how the public she served was awash in online disinformation. She was like a relic from 2005 and almost certainly less effective in her job as a result. Obviously, a core purpose of SBM is to refute medical misinformation. However, it makes no sense to merely care about why misinformation is wrong while being deliberately ignorant about how it spreads and is disseminated. To deny the role of social media in propagating misinformation is a form of germ theory denial, not for pathogens, but for ideas.

Misinformation can go viral, after all. You don’t need to rely on my anecdote above to know this. There is plenty of research showing how social media drives vaccine hesitancy, often at the hands of malign foreign actors. The Center for Countering Digital Hate detailed this in their report The Disinformation Dozen, and Renee Diresta has both studied this in detail and sadly experienced herself how social media mobs can have a... Her book Invisible Rulers is a must read. You won’t see the world in the same way.

According to one review. Received 2021 May 31; Accepted 2022 Jan 6; Issue date 2022. This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. The spread of misinformation in social media has become a severe threat to public interests. For example, several incidents of public health concerns arose out of social media misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Against the backdrop of the emerging IS research focus on social media and the impact of misinformation during recent events such as the COVID-19, Australian Bushfire, and the USA elections, we identified disaster, health,... Following a systematic review process, we chose 28 articles, relevant to the three themes, for synthesis. We discuss the characteristics of misinformation in the three domains, the methodologies that have been used by researchers, and the theories used to study misinformation. We adapt an Antecedents-Misinformation-Outcomes (AMIO) framework for integrating key concepts from prior studies. Based on the AMIO framework, we further discuss the inter-relationships of concepts and the strategies to control the spread of misinformation on social media. Ours is one of the early reviews focusing on social media misinformation research, particularly on three socially sensitive domains; disaster, health, and politics.

This review contributes to the emerging body of knowledge in Data Science and social media and informs strategies to combat social media misinformation. Keywords: Misinformation, Information disorder, Social media, Systematic literature review Rumors, misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information are common challenges confronting media of all types. It is, however, worse in the case of digital media, especially on social media platforms. Ease of access and use, speed of information diffusion, and difficulty in correcting false information make control of undesirable information a horrid task [1]. Alongside these challenges, social media has also been highly influential in spreading timely and useful information.

For example, the recent #BlackLivesMatter movement was enabled by social media, which united concurring people's solidarity across the world when George Floyd was killed due to police brutality, and so are 2011 Arab spring... Although, scholars have addressed information disorder in social media, a synthesis of the insights from these studies are rare. A doctor fills syringes with the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine this week at the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse in San Gabriel, Calif. Sarah Reingewirtz/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images hide caption A doctor fills syringes with the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine this week at the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse in San Gabriel, Calif. The odds of dying after getting a COVID-19 vaccine are virtually nonexistent.

According to recent data from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, you're three times more likely to get struck by lightning. But you might not know that from looking at your social media feed.

Social Media And The Spread Of Misinformation Infectious And A Threat

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