The infodemiological model and its application to managing infodemics: Nuances worth discussing

by Theresa Senft and Tina Purnat

Both epidemics and infodemics can lead to negative outcomes for individual health, health systems, economies, and the whole of society. Because they are frequently intertwined, there is an urgent need and desire for practitioners in the field of infodemic management to express their concerns and aims using concepts and language that can interface with epidemic response tools and structures.

The epidemiological model

When managing epidemics, best practice generally involves deploying methods to analyze and control the spread of disease that focus on person, time, and place. The epidemiological model is applied in understanding and mitigating disease outbreaks in an ecosystem. We show below its elements that can later be compared to the infodemiological model.

The information ecosystem and infodemiological model

Recently, the infodemiological model has been evolving to provide a coherent model of the information ecosystem. In drawing analogies withe epidemiology, we developed this model:

Components of the infodemiological model

There are several important characteristics of infodemics that describe the information ecosystem:

#1 The agents of infodemics are humans and human-made technologies which have been designed to improve society (In epidemiology, the agent is a virus, bacterium, etc, which are natural and sometimes essential to human life balance).

#2 The quality of the communication environment that humans use can affect the spread of the infodemic.

• The communication environment can be both internal (thought one has with oneself) or external to the human. (In epidemiology, the external physical environment affects the spread of the outbreak – air, water, climate, etc.)
• An infodemic spreads differently depending on the quality of the communication environment it is propagating in. How the infodemic evolves depends on whether it is driven by low quality information, feeling of information overflow, mis- or disinformation. (An epidemic often occurs due to change of balance of natural environment due to humans actions. How the epidemic evolves depends on whether it is caused by a naturally occurring outbreak, a deliberate biological attack with an engineered pathogen, and what the environmental conditions related to the pathogen spread).

#3 Information is thoughts and feelings that humans experience and it is represented in ways that has value to someone. (In epidemiology, pathogens are potentially harmful organisms.)

#4 Humans share information through messages. (In epidemiology, pathogens locate hosts, with which they exchange biological messages.)

#5 How messages are understood by others depends on their format: the medium they are receiving it, the genre of the message, and the pace at which they are receiving it. For example: The same message will have a different meaning to people if they think they are watching a news programme vs a comedy show; the perception that information moves at too fast a pace is “overflow”. (In epidemiology, pathogens are transmitted between hosts through formats like fluids, air, etc.)

#6 The infodemic spreads because human agents make choices that result in their behavior. This human choice is whether the message is taken up by the human. Unlike exposure to a virus leading to disease, there is a human who is making choices in between “being exposed to information” and “outcome”.

Why does this matter?

Often assumptions are made that put the emphasis of infodemic response on the message instead of the uptake of this message by the human agent. This can misdirect the attention of responders in two important ways:

First: Technology will always be able to create more messages than we can control in the information ecosystem.

• In epidemic control, it is not effective to use approaches that demand maximum hygiene, or to expect people to live with an approach to have “zero risk” way of life. Similarly, emphasizing information hygiene in infodemiology is not an effective solution to a systemic challenge.
• Moreover, just like viruses and bacteria mutate and adapt to the epidemic interventions, and similarly, the elements of the information ecosystem, narratives, formats, and as well as human agents adapt to information hygiene approaches.
• Therefore, policies aimed at removing the content from or pumping more information into the information ecosystem have low effectiveness. Such actions are reactive and always run after the infodemic events after they have already occurred.

Second, by focusing on the message, we miss the opportunity to use a powerful tool to influence human behavior – people have been socially trained to navigate the marketplace of ideas in society. (we call it “shopping”)

• Advertising is already using these tools and levers for commercial purposes, but public health has not systematically applied these.
• ?People take up messages that are aimed at: convincing them they will be better off if they do something; eliciting satisfaction that the action will serve them better than any other alternative; causing reflection that they may reduce harm by taking an action; or instilling a fear that the action they make is inferior and therefore they should take a different action.

Therefore, effective infodemic management strategies and infodemiology metrics must focus on:

• Effectively leveraging medium, genre and timing of the messages that human recipients recognize and relate to. Infodemic managers must work to reach people with relevant messages in the right format and at the right time.
• Understanding and influencing the human’s choice at the point in between “information diet” and “outcome/action”
• Aiming interventions and policies at ensuring the “quality” of the communication environment and understanding how this quality affects the dynamics of infodemics (smilarly, epidemics evolve differently in disease outbreaks, deliberate biological attacks or in the context of low-, middle- or high-income countries).?

Part two of this discussion is posted here.