Infodemic during the Covid-19 Pandemic Time
We have probably heard of infodemic where too much information overwhelms us. It has increased a lot in recent days as we are relying more and more on online media, social media that disseminates information really fast. It also relates to how much people rely on mainstream media and look for alternative sources of information.
The process of understanding its behavior was easier for three researchers — Dr. Shabana Khan from Indian Research Academy, India; Dr. Jyoti Misra from Leeds University, UK; and myself (Dr. Nova Ahmed) from North South University, Bangladesh, since we received a generous fund from Global Development Network. We explored the presence of infodemic in major online newspapers published in these three countries.
Why these three countries, Bangladesh, India and theUK? It appeared that three countries with varied socio-economic conditions; varied internet literacy level and availability experienced infodemic during the pandemic time. And, of course, because it was this all-female team that started with good friendship, respect, and trust.
We looked at three different newspapers to start with that had online presence — The Daily Star from Bangladesh, India Times from India and Guardian from the UK. We wanted to explore local newspapers but many of them did not have the global perspective or countrywide unified presence that was needed for an initial analysis. The data was analyzed for a period of 3.5 Five years (January,2020 to June, 2023) — before, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.
It was a team of three more researchers who scraped the data from the newspaper, analyzed it using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, and processed the results that made sense — we had Khusboo Mundada, Siam Hossain Shanto, and Ifti Azad Abeer working as researchers where the Shanto handled the majority of the analysis part. I remember having long conversations over the findings, meeting after his office hours — sometimes in coffee shops, and when it felt over-priced, we met at my house!
The findings were interesting. In Bangladesh, during the time of the study, there was the presence of ICT act that was ciriticised for limiting open sharing of news over online media. The amount of infodemic were lowest here and the presence of this ICT act could be a possible factor. On the other hand, India had a large presence of infodemic over these three years while the UK had the amount just in between. The strange observation from UK was around the peak infodemic times over the years when there was a scandal published right around the same time. Indian news peaked mainly around local and global issues having both positive and negative perspectives. Peak infodemic news from Bangladesh mainly focused on local issues, specifically injustice.
What did we learn from it? We learned a lot. Although, infodemic feels like a free flowing information — it is not that harmless. It shapes up and gets healthier with more difficult situations and the media organizations, journalists and policy makers all have responsibility to make sure it does not go out of hand to harm ordinary people who would believe in the news without thinking further.
Just to put things into context, I have received countless messages from my mom about how you can swallow Covid germs through a home made tea, various prayers from known and unknown people that handles it and interestingly, knowingly or unknowingly the thoughts remained with me. The further I went into the rural regions, the confidence on the online information seemed stronger among people. And that is where the risk remains. The infodemic related awareness and regulations should be around to protect people who might be manipulated using nice crafted information. We hope that our paper will be out soon and we can share more interesting insights with you all.
