How to Fight an Infodemic: The Four Pillars of Infodemic Management

Abstract

In this issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the World Health Organization (WHO) is presenting a framework for managing the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infodemic. Infodemiology is now acknowledged by public health organizations and the WHO as an important emerging scientific field and critical area of practice during a pandemic. From the perspective of being the first "infodemiologist" who originally coined the term almost two decades ago, I am positing four pillars of infodemic management: (1) information monitoring (infoveillance); (2) building eHealth Literacy and science literacy capacity; (3) encouraging knowledge refinement and quality improvement processes such as fact checking and peer-review; and (4) accurate and timely knowledge translation, minimizing distorting factors such as political or commercial influences. In the current COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations has advocated that facts and science should be promoted and that these constitute the antidote to the current infodemic. This is in stark contrast to the realities of infodemic mismanagement and misguided upstream filtering, where social media platforms such as Twitter have advertising policies that sideline science organizations and science publishers, treating peer-reviewed science as "inappropriate content."

Keywords: COVID-19; infodemic; infodemiology; infoveillance; pandemic; epidemics; emergency management; public health.

Figure 1

The Information “Cake” Model. The four pillars of infodemic management are information monitoring (infoveillance; top left); building eHealth Literacy and science literacy (top right); encouraging knowledge refinement and quality improvement processes for information providers, such as fact checking and peer review (bottom left); and Knowledge Translation, meaning to translate knowledge from one layer to another, while minimizing distorting factors (bottom right). eHealth: electronic health; KT: knowledge translation.