Communications of the ACM
COVID-19's YouTube Misinformation Outbreak
A study found many YouTube videos on COVID-19 contained inaccurate information about treatments, cures, and even conspiracy theories.
Credit: MedPage Today
Many YouTube videos on COVID-19 contained inaccurate information about treatments, cures, and even conspiracy theories, researchers found.
Nineteen of 69 most viewed videos (27.5%), which had over 62 million views in total, were faulty, with entertainment news, network news, and Internet news as the biggest offenders, reported Heidi Oi-Yee Li, a medical student at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, and colleagues, writing in BMJ Global Health.
The authors noted that this pattern is similar to those of other public health crises, with about 23% to 26% of videos on YouTube about the H1N1 flu pandemic, the Ebola outbreak, and the Zika outbreak containing misleading information, where "reputable videos were under-represented."
From MedPage Today
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