Accuracy of Social Media Posts About COVID-19 Prevention in Peru

Zela-Coila F.; Alarcon-Casazuela A.L.; Yauri J.; Herrera L.; Laura-Pacco K.; Villanueva-Rivera S.; Huamani-Huanqque S.; Llanos Rosas M.G. · Revista Cubana de Medicina General Integral (2025)

Resumen

Introduction: The pandemic tightened the link between social networks and the population, generating a large wave of erroneous or inaccurate information. Objective: To analyze the accuracy of the publications on COVID-19 prevention that are most frequently shared through social network platforms in the Peruvian population. Methods: Google Trends was used to identify the most searched keywords on Ivermectin, mask, vaccine and hand washing topics. These were used to perform a search on Buzzsumo. The 10 publications with the most interactions on each topic were chosen by ranking them through peer review according to their accuracy over the period 05/26/2020-03/31/2021. Results: From the analysis of the top 10 most disseminated publications of the 4 COVID-19 prevention topics, more news items were found to be accurate (27/40). Facebook was the platform with the highest number of interactions (97.74%). “Ivermectin” was found to have more interactions (53.62%) with more misinformation and a high number of shares (87.45%), “hand washing” presented the lowest number of interactions (0.62%). Conclusions: The publications are mostly accurate; however, interactions vary by topic. It is worrying that the topic of greatest interest and with uninformative content is ivermectin. Thus, Buzzsumo can be a useful tool that health authorities can use when monitoring the consumption of information by the population on a topic of current interest.

Instituciones: Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa