Click, Ignore or Repost: Subjective Assessment of the Reliability and Relevance of Information on COVID-19 in the Infodemic

The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by "infodemic", including the spread of excessive amount of information regarding coronavirus. The study aimed to reveal which role the source and online context of COVID-related information takes in the probability of clicking and reposting this information and its relationship to the reaction to the pandemic, individualism and collectivism. 396 adults who did not have COVID-19 and lived in Central (n = 207), Siberian (n = 63) and Far Eastern (n = 126) regions of the Russian Federation evaluated their expectations and subjective probability of clicking and reposting four COVID-related messages (from politician - president, health specialist - president of WHO, journalist - link to a broadcast, personal story) on the four possible backgrounds (Ministry of Health Care website, Yandex news, Facebook, WhatsApp). Then the participants filled in the Monitoring Information About Coronavirus Scale and Coronavirus-Related Anxiety Scale, modification of the brief Positive and Negative Affect Scale. Facebook was seen as equal or more trustful than Yandex. People are more ready to click the links about COVID-19 if they expect the message to be important, trustful for them and clarifying the situation, regardless of what kind of emotional changes they predict. People are more ready to repost the links about COVID-19 if they expect this message to change their mind or behavior. "Infodemic" includes not only the social processes of the spread of information but also the psychological processes of evaluation, clicking, reading and reposting.