The COVID-19 pandemic and the fake news: a literature review

Abstract

This article presents the results of the narrative review on fake news that occurred during the most critical period of the COVID-19 pandemic. A word search was carried out in the BVSMS, BVSalud, and Scielo databases, using the expression fake news AND COVID-19, notícia falsa AND COVID-19, and desinformación AND COVID-19, since these expressions addressed the two languages selected for the review: Portuguese and Spanish. The inclusion criterion favored articles that used the web as a source of research, published between 2020 and 2022. A total of 24 articles were analyzed, 14 written in Portuguese and 10 in Spanish. The year 2022 concentrated the largest number of publications (n=11), and we concluded that social networks are the vehicles for the greatest dissemination of this type of information. The spread of fake news during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic was as worrying as the disease itself, but the literature has not explored sufficiently the phenomenon that still follows the pandemic still underway. Most of the analyzed texts advised to the use of the news dissemination strategy to disseminate useful information about health, concluding that the analyzed studies demonstrated that the false news were incomplete or misleading, but most were unintentional.