Conflicts of interest comprise financial interests, activities, and relationships within the past 3 years including but not limited to employment, aff

Spread of Misinformation About Face Masks and COVID-19 by Automated Software on Facebook

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2021-06-07 18:00:17

Conflicts of interest comprise financial interests, activities, and relationships within the past 3 years including but not limited to employment, affiliation, grants or funding, consultancies, honoraria or payment, speaker's bureaus, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, royalties, donation of medical equipment, or patents planned, pending, or issued.

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Ayers JW, Chu B, Zhu Z, et al. Spread of Misinformation About Face Masks and COVID-19 by Automated Software on Facebook. JAMA Intern Med. Published online June 07, 2021. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.2498

The dangers of misinformation spreading on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic are known.1 However, software that allows individuals to generate automated content and share it via counterfeit accounts (or “bots”)2 to amplify misinformation has been overlooked, including how automated software can be used to disseminate original research while undermining scientific communication.

We analyzed conversations on public Facebook groups, a platform known to be susceptible to automated misinformation,3 concerning the publication of the Danish Study to Assess Face Masks for the Protection Against COVID-19 Infection (DANMASK-19) to explore automated misinformation.4 We selected DANMASK-19 because it was widely discussed (it was the fifth most shared research article of all time as of March 2021 according to Altmetric5) and demonstrated that masks are an important public health measure to control the pandemic.

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