RAPID: Measuring Information Consumption and Beliefs During the Covid-19 Pandemic.

In recent months, the global COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a surge in pandemic-related false information, exposing shortcomings in the diffusion of high quality information through online networks and in our understanding of who is most susceptible to false and misleading information during times of crisis. Important questions remain about who is able to discriminate low-quality information from high-quality information related to COVID-19 and who is most vulnerable to low-quality information during the pandemic. This project investigates susceptibility to false and misleading information both in the time of, and related to, the COVID-19 pandemic. As government agencies, civic organizations, and for-profit companies work together to combat coronavirus-related false information, an understanding of who is most likely to believe false information ? and mistrust true information ? is necessary for crafting and distributing targeted public health communications.

Social and behavioral literature offer competing insights into how the current epidemic might impact people?s ability to evaluate the veracity of information. This project will test a series of theoretically informed hypotheses about why we might expect people?s ability to correctly identify the veracity of information to change in the time of COVID-19, and why we might expect people?s ability to discern the veracity of COVID-19 related information to differ from their ability to ascertain the veracity of non-Covid-19 related information. By sourcing real time news articles to crowds of ordinary citizens as well as professional fact checkers over a multi-month period, this project will investigate the individual-level determinants of susceptibility to false information in real time, whether ordinary citizens can be employed to crowdsource the labeling of high- and low-quality information, and whether crowdsourced fact-checking can reduce the prevalence of false information in the information ecosystem.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.