Due to COVID-19, the past two years have been marked by a sense of confusion
and uncertainty as people navigate this new public health crisis.
People receive and share information about COVID-19 through multiple channels in the
face of uncertainty during the COVID-19 crisis, it is important to ask to what
extent do people trust COVID-19 information, from which information sources and platforms,
and how does trust develop over time? To answer this question we conducted
a mixed-methods longitudinal study including an eight-wave survey from September to December 2020,
focused on lower-income groups in the United States
who have been heavily impacted by the pandemic.
The survey questions focused on understanding people's information practices
during COVID-19 and their level of trust towards COVID-related information and information sources.
177 respondents completed all waves of the survey. After survey data analysis
between April and July 2021, we continued doing an interview study with 21 participants.
One question we asked was if people use social media for getting COVID-19 information in the past
week. Our survey data suggests a significant decrease in social media use over time.
But why do we see this decline? Our interview data suggest that a decline in
trust accounted for the largest change in social media use for COVID-information consumption.
An inability to change others' misbelief and mistrust led to the non-use of social media.
For participants who still use social media for COVID-19 information consumption,
many people mentioned they used but not relied on it, indicating they neither reached an adequate
level of trust for information from social media nor did they use it for making decisions.
Our findings through triangulation of the survey and interview data
directly contradict other work and articles regarding the use and reliance on social media.
We argue that we need to take great care in what is inferred from the survey responses. Therefore
it is important to differentiate the use of social media from the reliance on it.
Additionally we observed a shift in trustee occurred,
meaning that who were what people trusted shifts from information on social media to social media
platforms themselves. People's past experiences with misinformation on social media has produced
a generalized distrust for these platforms in their entirety. Once distrust is ingrained
into the truster or people, it consequently makes rebuilding trust more challenging.
Other than the distrust in social media, participants also expressed their distrust
in more fundamental information: the COVID data. Our study data suggests 35 percent
of the respondents believed that the COVID-19 data was intentionally inaccurately reported.
However, this number significantly decreased over time, suggesting a decrease in distrust.
And there's no significant change in the frequency of getting this information.
Additionally, we find that distrust in information about the COVID-19 data was negatively associated
with the frequency in which individuals received information about it. These results motivated
us to ask in the interview study: in what ways is distrust associated with information consumption?
Now let's take a look at the relationship between participants' information consumption
and their level of distrust. These dots represent survey respondents' average of values
across all waves. The colored dots represent interview participants' data. As one example,
let's find where P06 and P08 are located. P6 is located at the top left corner
indicating that he had received little COVID information but had high distrust;
whereas P8 is located at the bottom right corner, indicating that he had received a
lot of information about COVID-19 and had low distrust. When examining why people like P06 held
strong distrust, we find the participants' distrust arises from skepticism in the validity
of the COVID-19 data production processes. For example, P06 was saying: "my friend's dad had
a heart failure and died. They took the PCR test and it was negative... But at the end, the death
certificate says it's COVID. Somebody's getting paid for putting COVID on the death certificate,
so that contributes to the inflation number. While his reasoning process alongside his little
information consumption suggests that he relied on the information he received from his personal
network. This information serves as his baseline to evaluate the trustworthiness and the validity
of the coordinating data. Well, only relying on information from personal networks runs the risk
of over-generalizing individual cases. Then let's turn to P08 who worked at the public health sector
and his daily job is "fixing death records because data is critical during COVID and we
were constantly trying to make sure that they were recorded properly and data is accurate.
Well, one might argue that it is the nature of P08's occupation being a staff working in a public
health sector that influences his response, but let's take a look at what he said next.
"Right now because of our famous reimbursement program, we are seeing a lot of COVID being
added to death records. I'm totally not unsure what's going on to do with national stats, but
i think the numbers are going to be a little bit artificially higher because of these programs."
Well, taken together these quotes suggest that P08 believed that the COVID-19 data,
in general, was truthful, but had reasons to be suspicious in other respects regarding the
data production procedures. As such, his trust exists and dominates but is tempered by distrust.
Our observations on the coexistence of trust and distrust are referred to as bonded trust.
Then recall that this trust regarding the COVID-19 data decreaseS over time, but we ask why?
Our interview suggests that participants' distrust decreased as data discrepancy
across data platforms reduced. Therefore, we are in the stage of trusting and distrusting
while infrastructuring. This timely work contributes to our understanding of how trust and
distrust are shaped by the information production representation and dissemination through social
media and emerging COVID-19 data platforms and how trust and distrust shift over time.