Three contextual dimensions of information on social media: lessons learned from the COVID-19 infodemic

Three contextual dimensions of information on social media: lessons learned from the COVID-19 infodemic discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an explosion of inaccurate, misleading and irrelevant information. Countermeasures thus far seem to have limited success. Three types of informational context are described: weak epistemic, strong normative and strong emotional. These contexts have not been taken into account by current measures to reduce informational disorders yet. This paper shows how these contexts are related to the infodemic and measures for dealing with them for future global crisis situations.

Authors Dr. ir. L. (Lavinia) Marin is a postdoctoral researcher working on the project “Reconceptualizing critical thinking for online environments: extended, embodied, social”. Besides this, she works as project manager for the Ethics Education for Engineers – 4TU.Ethics project, affiliated researcher for the COMET project and as web and content manager for the ethics page of TU Delft.

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