Are you immune to Infodemic?

Spoiler: no, you are not.

We live in the Content Overproduction Ages. We even coined a new word to explain what’s happening in the information ecosystem during the COVID-19 emergency. The word is infodemic [1].

Grammatically, infodemic is a portmanteau of “information” and “epidemic”. It refers to the fast increasing amount of content production about a topic, no regard if accurate, non-accurate, even completely false.

The fast content over-production is a typical characteristic of the infosphere: it’s a natural consequence of the digital revolution and of the decreasing cost for content production and distribution.

We only need

• a device connected to the internet
• a platform
• a piece of content suitable both for the device and the platform

Suddenly we can turn ourselves into a broadcaster.

The User Generated Content is a neverending flow.

In this context, we should expect by professional media strong choices. But for several reasons — a non-exhaustive list here: crisis, old models, the use of social media to drive traffic to websites, the use of quantitative metrics to measure success, the advertising business model, in some case political interests or the interest of…