engleski

Aspects of COVID-19 infodemic and its legal consequences

Formal education, transportation, socialization and other aspects of our lives have been affected by the 2019 coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19) and this has increased fear and anxiety in most people. Furthermore, lack of control, helplessness, concern about the absence of knowledge about COVID-19 and its negative impact on daily life are some of the reasons why people seek information about this disease. People often believe in the released information without adequate verification whether that information is true or false. However, nowadays, we very often encounter fake news while browsing social media. The main goal of fake news is to lead the reader to the wrong information for the purpose of damaging the personality rights of a person or entity or to profit. The fake news can destabilize society and have dangerous or even fatal consequences. The damage caused to the personality right is sometimes irreversible, even after we prove that the released informations are fake. The infodemic and fake news have much in common, because one of the goals of fake news is to publish a large amount of misleading information and the infodemic is an overload of information. Both serve to confuse the average user who cannot interpret their truthfulness. Infodemic can often turn into infomania, a term used to describe people’s tendency to obsessively check news on social media and the internet. This study has three goals: (1) to give a theoretical insight into the phenomenon of infodemic through the qualitative method of content analysis, (2) to explore students' attitudes towards infodemic concerning COVID-19 through the quantitative method of online survey which will reveal the most employed information sources and channels as well as the most retrieved topics about COVID-19 among students’ population with a special emphasize of ways they check information reliability and (3) to explore, through the qualitative method of comparative analysis, the legal consequences of infodemic worldwide.

fake news ; infodemic ; pandemic ; students

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