When we had our first lockdown in Metro Manila last year on March 15, no one would have expected us to be where we are right now. When we look back to the times before the pandemic and compare those experiences to our current situation, everything seems surreal. It doesn’t feel right to be stuck at home for depressingly long periods of time. Personally, the pandemic has significantly affected my social life – I get almost no face-to-face social interaction. Being an ambivert, I acknowledge that I need that daily dose of social interaction from friends. Despite those problems, it’s a massive privilege for my direct family and me to be safe from the virus as millions of others suffer physically and financially. We are safe from the financial loss, loneliness, death, and sadness that plague the earth due to COVID. However, there is one huge problem that I indirectly suffer from, and which many people suffer from as well – the rise of misinformation in the pandemic, mostly stemming from new media.
When a person hears the phrase “new media,” I’d be willing to bet that they’d think of a social media site like Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube. That being the case, I’ll focus on that specific aspect of new media, as it is extremely relevant to the rise of misinformation in the pandemic.
For an academic definition of social media, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, p.61) define it as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web...
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