Taxonomy of Misinformation Harms from Social Media in Humanitarian Crises

During humanitarian crises, people face dangers and need a large amount of information in a short period of time. Such need creates the base for misinformation such as rumors, fake news or hoaxes to spread within and outside the affected community. It could be unintended misinformation with unconfirmed details, or intentional disinformation created to trick people for benefits. Information harms are its effects that can generate serious short term or long-term consequences. Although some researchers have created misinformation detection systems and algorithms, or examined the roles of behavioral characteristics of involved parties, or examined the way successful rumors spread and convince people, not much attention has been paid regarding the types of misinformation harms. Adopting the findings from the literature, in the humanitarian crises, we propose a taxonomy of information harms that can be used in the context of humanitarian crises. Such taxonomy can act as the base for future research to quantitatively measure the harms in specific contexts