Social media: A watchdog or a conspiracy breeder?: COVID-19 disinformation among Iraqi students

Abstract

The author seeks to determine the scale of conspiracy belief among undergraduate students and their dependency on social media to enhance their conspiracy theories. The first goal was to determine the extent to which conspiracy theories affect how undergraduates explain and understand crises and events. For example, theories about secret government cabals controlling Iraqi citizens’ lives and other issues. The second objective is to apply COVID-19 as a case to determine the extent of the conspiratorial interpretation of the sprea)d of the virus through exposure to misinformation through social media and how social media impacted it. The study was recruited from a snowball sample of students in two universities in Baghdad. Sample size 331 (230 males and 101 females) aged 19–24. They were surveyed through phone interviews. The study applied media dependency and conspiracy theories in survey research on a snowball sample in two major public universities in Baghdad. The survey shows undergraduate students depend on conspiracies from social media, especially Facebook. Moreover, the study finds that students believe in government malfeasance. In contrast, many students believe in multiple COVID-19 conspiracies, global government conspiracies, scientific conspiracies, extraterrestrial coverups, and government conspiracies meant to cause personal harm. Finally, there was no significant difference between males and females in dependence on media or scale of conspiracy belief.

Keywords

• conspiracy theories
• media dependency
• social media
• undergraduate students
• COVID-19