A senior doctor in charge of the NHS anti-disinformation campaign has said that language and cultural barriers could be causing people from ethnic minorities to reject the COVID-19 vaccine. Dr Harpreet Sood told the BBC it was “a big concern” and officials were working hard to reach different groups “to correct so much fake news”.
Some of the disinformation is religiously targeted with messages falsely claiming the vaccines contain animal produce like pork and beef which goes against the religious beliefs of Muslims and Hindus, respectively.
The issue of language is key because most warnings about misinformation online are in a written format. Take Facebook’s adoption of new alerts supported by independent fact-checkers, for example. They warn users of fake news and to try to prevent them from sharing it unknowingly. It is certainly a step in the right direction. But text warnings can be easily misunderstood and ignored. And that’s the problem.
Our research, which will be published later in the year, explores this issue and examines new, more visual, ways to warn users about potential misinformation. For our study, we manipulated a standard Facebook page design to develop ten different visualisation effects.
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Source: Fake news: bold visual warnings needed to stop people clicking – new research