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Funder: University of Oxford Covid-19 Research Response Fund; Grant(s): Project Reference: 0009519, We explore the implications of online social endorsement for the Covid-19 vaccination program in the United Kingdom. Vaccine hesitancy is a long-standing problem, but it has assumed great urgency due to the pandemic. By early 2021, the United Kingdom had the world’s highest Covid-19 mortality per million of population. Our survey of a nationally representative sample of UK adults ( N = 5,114) measured socio-demographics, social and political attitudes, media diet for getting news about Covid-19, and intention to use social media and personal messaging apps to encourage or discourage vaccination against Covid-19. Cluster analysis identified six distinct media diet groups: news avoiders, mainstream/official news samplers, super seekers, omnivores, the social media dependent, and the TV dependent. We assessed whether these media diets, together with key attitudes, including Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy mentality, and the news-finds-me attitude (meaning giving less priority to active monitoring of news and relying more on one’s online networks of friends for information), predict the intention to encourage or discourage vaccination. Overall, super-seeker and omnivorous media diets are more likely than other media diets to be associated with the online encouragement of vaccination. Combinations of (a) news avoidance and high levels of the news-finds-me attitude and (b) social media dependence and high levels of conspiracy mentality are most likely to be associated with online discouragement of vaccination. In the direct statistical model, a TV-dependent media diet is more likely to be associated with online discouragement of vaccination, but the moderation model shows that a TV-dependent diet most strongly attenuates the relationship between vaccine hesitancy and discouraging vaccination. Our findings support public health communication based on four main methods. First, direct contact, through the post, workplace, or community structures, and through phone counseling via local health services, could reach the news avoiders. Second, TV public information advertisements should point to authoritative information sources, such as National Health Service (NHS) and other public health websites, which should then feature clear and simple ways for people to share material among their online social networks. Third, informative social media campaigns will provide super seekers with good resources to share, while also encouraging the social media dependent to browse away from social media platforms and visit reliable and authoritative online sources. Fourth, social media companies should expand and intensify their removal of vaccine disinformation and anti-vax accounts, and such efforts should be monitored by well-resourced, independent organizations.

Highlights • Created an automated system to verify COVID-19 news and information. • Leveraged multiple platforms to mimic contemporary “media diets”. • Used an accessible news feed, allowing mainstream adoption. • Enabled future research to help consumers make informed decisions about accuracy. • Built infrastructure for crowdsourcing COVID-19 misinformation data., There is an abundance of misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news” related to COVID-19, leading the director-general of the World Health Organization to term this an ‘infodemic’. Given the high volume of COVID-19 content on the Internet, many find it difficult to evaluate veracity. Vulnerable and marginalized groups are being misinformed and subject to high levels of stress. Riots and panic buying have also taken place due to “fake news”. However, individual research-led websites can make a major difference in terms of providing accurate information. For example, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center website has over 81 million entries linked to it on Google. With the outbreak of COVID-19 and the knowledge that deceptive news has the potential to measurably affect the beliefs of the public, new strategies are needed to prevent the spread of misinformation. This study seeks to make a timely intervention to the information landscape through a COVID-19 “fake news”, misinformation, and disinformation website. In this article, we introduce CoVerifi, a web application which combines both the power of machine learning and the power of human feedback to assess the credibility of news. By allowing users the ability to “vote” on news content, the CoVerifi platform will allow us to release labelled data as open source, which will enable further research on preventing the spread of COVID-19-related misinformation. We discuss the development of CoVerifi and the potential utility of deploying the system at scale for combating the COVID-19 “infodemic”.

Los estudios indican que los jóvenes han modificando sus die-tas mediáticas y cada vez navegan más por Internet en detri-mento del consumo televisivo. Las conclusiones que se presen-tan son resultado de un estudio cualitativo centrado en las moti-vaciones que llevan a los/las adolescentes de clase media-baja de Barcelona y Lima a consumir un medio u otro en determina-dos contextos. Concretamente, se estudian los usos de la televi-sión y de Internet: para qué consumen los y las jóvenes la tele-visión y para qué navegan por Internet. El artículo repasa las conclusiones de los principales estudios sobre jóvenes y con-sumos mediáticos y recoge las distintas reflexiones teóricas alrededor de la ‘guerra de las pantallas’./nLa principal conclusión es que, mientras la televisión se considera un modo de desco-nexión, Internet se ha convertido en fuente de entretenimiento y socialización. Los usuarios siguen asociando la pantalla de televisión a un uso relajante. Se reflexiona también sobre las carencias en competencia mediática de los jóvenes entrevistados./nLa metodología se ha basado en la realización de cuatro focus groups con 41 alum-nos/as entre 14 y 17 años de clase media-baja de once centros de educación secunda-ria de Barcelona y Lima. Studies indicate that young people are changing their media diet and they surf online at the expense of television viewing. The conclu-sions presented here are based on the results of a qualitative study. The study focuses on the motiva-tions that drive adolescents of the lower-middle class society of Barcelona and Lima to consume one media or another depending on the context. We are most importantly studying the use of television and Internet: why young people watch television and surf on the Internet. The article reviews the findings of major studies on youth and media consumption and collects the different theoretical reflections regarding the 'war of screens'./nThe main conclusion is that while television is considered an off mode, the Internet has become a source of entertainment and socialization. Users still associate the television screen as a relaxing concept. The article also reflects the youth gaps on media competition./nThe methodology is based on four focus groups of 41 students. The students are aged between 14 and 17 and are from the lower-middle class society of eleven high schools in Barcelona and Lima.

Desde una reflexión teórica, el artículo evidencia la influen-cia de la tecnología en la evolución del espacio de recepción televisiva, exigiendo a los investigadores del campo un ma-yor nivel de formación ante la responsabilidad que conlleva el momento actual. Finalmente insinúa líneas de acción para aquellos que persiguen contribuir a que las nuevas audien-cias alcancen la competencia mediática en un escenario de convergencia digital, que impone nuevos retos y múltiples posibilidades. El trabajo se centra en la sociedad digital en un contexto de convergencia digital esbozando los profun-dos cambios sociales en el que surgen nuevas audiencias, a veces escasamente cualificadas para afrontar estos universos digitales. Sin duda, está emergiendo una nueva generación, que se vislumbran autodidacta, con jóvenes capaces de co-municarse y producir con los dispositivos tecnológicos a los que tienen acceso, a veces con escasas competencias mediá-ticas. Este, hasta hace poco tiempo, inimaginable contexto se dibuja por la nítida desigualdad entre nativos y migrantes digitales, en una doble condición de responsabilidad, porque las nuevas posibilidades de acceso, distribución, consumo y producción de información y conocimiento exigen un re-planteamiento de preguntas, estrategias y participación, ante unas audiencias más expuestas y menos formadas., This work takes the transcendence of the emerging, vigorous concept of “media competence” to describe the evolution of the increasingly ubiquitous presence of communicative technologies in the society of digital leisure and information, and especially the impact of the Internet, in our lives. These changes in space and time that were already in motion thanks to the “television era” are now much greater in this new age of the network of networks. They present new challenges to this “society of screens” which now faces new audiences who are permanently exposed to any number of screens that are more reachable, accessible and univer-sal by the day. This work is based on the digital society within a context of digital convergence, and outlines the profound social changes that give rise to new audiences who are barely qualified to confront these digital universes. A new generation of young people is emerging that is self-taught and capable of communicating and producing with the technology available to them, often with hardly any media education. This context which would have been inconceivable until recently is now seen as a growing gap between digital natives and digital migrants. This merely increases the responsibility to find new opportunities for access, distribution, consumption and production of knowledge and information and which demands that we reformulate the questions, strategies and forms of participa-tion for audiences who are more exposed but less prepared.