Misinformation Policies in the COVID-19 Pandemic

In the age of social media, there continues to be a rapid exchange of information. Beneficial to our ever evolving society, this fast paced exchange of information has many downfalls — mainly misinformation and disinformation. As the COVID-19 pandemic impacted every aspect of life, the information surrounding the pandemic spread very easily and in many instances the information was not factual. Naming it an infodemic, the Director General of the World Health Organization warned countries about the dangers of this phenomenon (Ghebreyesus, 2020). While the spread of misinformation is inevitable, nations can enact policies to curb this spread, and they have. Even before, and during the pandemic, states have implemented different types of policies that fall into mainly three categories: (1) restrictive of human rights (2) directed towards big technology companies (3) advisories/campaigns. This thesis aims to evaluate the impact of different types of policies in a cross-national study including thirty different countries. I first categorize the different policies based on what the countries have enacted into the three categories or if they do not have a policy in place, categorize it as so. Building upon this analysis, I conducted a one-way ANOVA test and a Tukey’s HSD test on the mean responses for three questions that I used as a proxy for the spread of misinformation. I found that the lowest levels of misinformation were found in the states with policies that were restrictive of human rights. The conclusion outlines policy recommendations for states and future research: including a recommendation that states should expand their anti-misinformation programs and that researchers should conduct a country by country analysis.Bachelor of Art