ABSTRACT
Misinformation about the COVID-19 virus, prevention strategies, vaccines, and therapies constitute a global public health concern that undermines the ability of governments to combat the disease and leads to unintended fatalities and self-harm. During emergencies, the ability of communities and emergency services to make decisions may be severely hampered by the absence of trust in the information shared via social media. The urgency of the situation necessitates up-to-date information, which might be difficult to come by via more conventional means of building confidence. In order to emphasize the need of verifying content and source and to determine the role of power and duties, this article evaluates three models for using social media in emergency management information collection, quasi-journalistic verification model, and finally crowdsourcing model in connection to building of trust. The findings have significant ramifications for health agencies that want to improve their processes for incorporating user-generated content from social media sources into an emergency response.
