Impact of mobile connectivity and freedom on fake news propensity during the COVID-19 pandemic: a cross-country empirical examination

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a surge in the amount of fake news circulating on the Internet. However, despite the global bearing of the coronavirus pandemic, there is a significant variance in the propensity of COVID-19 related fake news instances across nations. To better understand the national-level factors contributing to the spread of fake news during the current pandemic, we theorise and examine the relationships of “mobile connectivity” and “freedom” (economic, political, and media) in a nation, with fake news propensity. We test the proposed model through a unique dataset comprising 72 countries generated by combining 6 independent cross-country data sources. We find that “mobile connectivity” and “political freedom” in a nation contribute to COVID-19 related fake news propensity, whereas “economic” and “media freedom” inhibit it. Our study provides preliminary insights into the mechanisms through which national-level systemic resources can be leveraged for battling the spread of fake news during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. In addition, our study offers several important implications for governments and policymakers that we believe will be instrumental in stimulating future research on the subject.

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS:

• Pär Ågerfalk, Kieran Conboy and Michael Myers

KEYWORDS:

• Fake news
• COVID-19
• pandemic
• mobile connectivity
• digital resilience
• country’s freedom
• dark side of IT
• uncertainty management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is an educational institution that offers journalism and media education and research services. It is based in St. Petersburg, Florida. The school is the owner of the International Fact-Checking Network (Bloomberg, 2018).

2. Sensemaking here refers to a socially constructed process triggered by a dynamically uncertain environment that enables individuals and collectives to extract cues from the environment to interpret and act on those interpretations on an ongoing basis (Christianson & Barton, 2020; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015)

3. As a robustness check, we repeated the analysis with natural logarithm of the population as a control variable. The results for all the research variables continued to remain the same. We sincerely thank the anonymous reviewer for the valuable suggestion to run this additional analysis that helped us establish the robustness of our results.

4. We wish to thank the anonymous reviewer for this valuable insight, which can be an important avenue for future research.

Additional information

Funding

Shirish C. Srivastava acknowledges the support received from the French National Research Agency (ANR), “Investissements d’Avenir” (LabEx Ecodec/ANR-11-LABX-0047) and HEC Paris Foundation.