World Health Organization Is Losing Credibility Towards Health-Sensitive Topics: Infodemiological Analysis of Facebook Users' Reactions

Résumé

The scientific infodemic constitutes one of the greatest threats to public health and safety today. Specifically, dis-misinformation regarding health-sensitive issues – like vaccines and climate change – is capable of causing severe epidemiological damage as well as jeopardizing the future of the human race. The main infodemiological countermeasures to this phenomenon include infoveillance, a scientific-epistemological training base for the lay public and researchers, and the improvement of the communication skills of the scientific community. Moreover, the success of a science dissemination campaign strongly depends on the credibility of the national and international government agencies assigned to the task. In this regard, this paper investigated the users' infodemic reactions on the official Facebook page of the most important health institution in the world, the World Health Organization. These findings showed a worrying increase in derision reactions about climate change-related posts (up to 22% in November 2022, with a quadratically growing trend over time since December 2020). Furthermore, infodemic reactions such as anger and especially derision made up the majority of emotional reactions to vaccine-related posts since 2021 and up to 44% of total reactions in November 2022 (median since July 2021 = 9%, IQR: 4% - 14 %). These findings signal that the World Health Organization is losing public credibility towards extremely relevant issues for global health. Infodemiological interventions in accordance with the recent literature are urgently required.

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