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The public has been overwhelmed by a wave of misleading and false information during the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization has denounced this “infodemic”, which can lead to mistrust of health authorities and undermine the public health response. People often don’t know what information to trust, making them vulnerable to misinformation.
New research suggests South Africans are more likely to trust scientific sources, such as doctors and the World Health Organization, than their own government. Most disapprove of the government’s handling of the pandemic.
These are the results of an online survey we conducted to find out where people got their information about COVID-19 and which sources they trusted the most. We also did a small experiment to test people’s opinions on vaccinations. Both were done online, meaning the opinions only represent South Africans with access to the web.
Our study, conducted with support from the Africa Infodemic Response Alliance of the World Health Organization (WHO), showed that when it came to obtaining information about the pandemic, South Africans seemed to ” rely mainly on “traditional” media sources. On average, 74% said they obtained information about COVID-19 through media such as television, radio and newspapers.
The results also showed that approval of the South African government’s response to the pandemic had waned compared to a year ago, when we conducted a similar study.
The current survey showed a high level of disapproval: 61% of those polled said they disapproved “strongly” or “somewhat” of the way the government was handling the pandemic, while only 21.1% said they disapproved of the government’s handling of the pandemic. ‘they “strongly approved”. This has an impact on the effectiveness of messages promoting vaccination. If recipients of pro-vaccination messages disapprove of the message sender, they are less likely to trust the content of the message or to share such messages with others.
The deterioration in the level of trust in government may be linked to the rollout of the stuttering vaccine in the country, which was high on the news agenda at the time of the study. The deployment plan suffered several setbacks and the government was widely criticized for not meeting its targets. The investigation was also carried out as the country’s Minister of Health Zweli Mkhize was placed on special leave as an investigation into allegations of corruption was underway.
The research
Our study had two parts.
First, we conducted an online survey in which we asked 1,585 South African social media users what media they consume, what news sources they trust the most, and their attitudes towards COVID-19 . We also asked them how they would rate the government’s response to the pandemic.
The second part of the study involved an online experience with 1,180 social media users. We set out to determine how effective social media messaging strategies were in promoting vaccination and what role the sender of the message played in how users responded to it.
The online survey showed that, overall, doctors and the World Health Organization were the most trusted sources of information, followed by radio and television. News sites, family and the South African government were less trustworthy. But they were still more trustworthy than social media, friends, community leaders, celebrities, and religious leaders.
Respondents who intended to vote for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) or the opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) tended to trust government communication more than supporters of other parties, such as the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA).
Overall, most said they consulted more established media sources such as television (85.6%), radio (79.2%) and newspapers (online 58.3%, print 73 , 4%) than social media. The exception was Facebook, which had high usage (85.1%), followed by WhatsApp (67.5%).
Google was also a popular platform for getting information from (85.3%), but other social media platforms like TikTok (19.6%), Twitter (29.2%), Instagram ( 26.6%) and YouTube (45.6%) were much less popular sources of information.
In the Facebook experience, participants saw one of four versions of a Facebook post that included a video encouraging citizens to get vaccinated. Each of the four versions was designed to look like it was posted from a different account. Two of these accounts were from political parties in South Africa (the ANC and the DA) and two were institutional accounts (the WHO and the National Ministry of Health).
All four messages included the same video, which was designed to resemble a #ViralFact message like those distributed by the WHO’s Africa Infodemic Response Alliance. The video combined two common health communication strategies, “humor” and “fear”.
We wanted to compare how users would react to the same information from different messengers. Specifically, we looked at whether different messengers would lead to people who are more or less likely to get the vaccine. We also looked at whether users would be more or less likely to share the social media posts based on their origin.
We found that the intentions of media users to get the vaccine were not particularly influenced by the political party that published the post. In any case, after seeing the Facebook ad, their intention to be vaccinated against COVID-19 remained very high, confirming the findings of other researchers.
But when it came to sharing posts on social media, users were less likely to say they would share the Facebook post when they thought it was from an ANC account. Users who were told the post was from the WHO, National Ministry of Health, or DA were much more likely to share the post.
The study supports other studies showing a relatively high rate of vaccine acceptance among South Africans. It also suggests that the content of pro-vaccination messages is important in promoting vaccine acceptance. The sender too.
Implications
The strong disapproval of the government’s handling of the pandemic, as well as the overall low level of trust in the ANC, should be a warning to government communicators that crafting persuasive pro-vaccine messages is not enough. The lack of trust in the messenger also has a negative impact on people’s trust in the message itself and on the likelihood of people sharing these messages.
This work is based on research supported by the National Institute of Human and Social Sciences.
Dani Madrid-Morales does not work, consult, own shares or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has not disclosed any relevant affiliation beyond his academic appointment. .
By Herman Wasserman, Professor of Media Studies at the Center for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town And
Dani Madrid-Morales, Assistant Professor of Journalism at the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication, University of Houston
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