코로나19 관련 허위정보에 대한 인식과 당파성의 역할

초록

As the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has had a severe effect and became politicized across the world, we have witnessed that the rapid spread of misinformation and misperceptions about the COVID-19 have been damaging to personal health as well as inflicting massive social costs for managing the public health crisis. Growing concerns about the social consequences of the COVID-19 infodemic have lead scholarly works to focus mainly on the extent to which people with misperceptions ignore the government guidelines or hesitate to vaccinate. However, much less empirical work has asked who are more susceptible to embrace misinformation. Using a online panel survey, the purpose of this study was to explore how misperceptions about the COVID-19 are distributed among the public in South Korea, focusing on the role of partisanship and partisan polarization. This analysis found that the direction and strength of partisan identities play a crucial role in embracing the COVID-19 misinformation. It also shows that presidential out-partisans tend to embrace substantially greater misperceptions than presidential co-partisans, and the partisan perception gap is more pronounced for those with higher levels of partisan polarization.

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