La División Académica de Ingeniería les hace una cordial invitación al Seminario híbrido

"Misinformation in the context of COVID-19 Pandemic: An Investigation of harm perceptions and related Social Media conversations"

que impartirá el Prof. H. Raghav Rao, AT&T Distinguished Chair in Infrastructure Assurance and Security Carlos Alvarez College of Business, The University of Texas at San Antonio, el próximo 18 de marzo a las 13:00 en el salón RH-108

Abstract:

In the environment of health crises, misinformation dissemination on social media has been shown to result in serious harms. In investigating misinformation harm, this paper focuses on two research questions: (1) How can the perceptions of harm from misinformation be characterized in health crises? (2) In what way are the harm perceptions associated with social media conversations in health crises? Focusing on the COVID-19 context, we address these research questions through two studies: In Study 1, we adapt the risk perception literature and utilize psychometric analysis to examine several COVID-19 misinformation scenarios, and characterize misinformation harm using three characteristics, i.e., unknown and dread (both of which are well known in the risk literature) and manageability (a concept that has hitherto not been discussed in the literature and is discovered in this paper). In Study 2, we follow a data driven approach that utilizes text mining to examine the association between harm perceptions and nature of communication in Twitterverse. We suggest propositions for future research. This research note is one of the early attempts at quantitatively measuring misinformation harms in the pandemic context. Our findings draw insights and suggestions for future related studies on misinformation harm. Keywords: Misinformation Harm, Risk Perception, Psychometric Analysis, Text mining, COVID-19 pandemic.

Bio:

Dr. H.R. Rao was named the AT&T Distinguished Chair in Infrastructure Assurance and Security at The University of Texas at San Antonio Carlos Alvarez College of Business in January 2016. He also holds a courtesy appointment as full professor in the UTSA Department of Computer Science. Prior to working at UTSA, Professor Rao was the SUNY Distinguished Service Professor at the University at Buffalo. He graduated from Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University

ZOOM: https://itam.zoom.us/j/99923690211?pwd=WWdPcW5GY29jaWozTUMyblRwUGw4Zz09