The Internet has heralded a new era of information technology and facilitated communication through different platforms. Several governments, organizations, and individuals recognize that social media has yielded significant advantages to their practices and easily delivers their messages. For the first time in their history, some governments and businesses offer jobs related to the social media landscape, such as Social Media Specialist, due to the technological and information revolution. Certainly, social media enables its users to distribute information and reach a mass audience irrespective of their geographic and demographic boundaries. Therefore, social media could breed new challenges when misused and exploited in dispensing rumors and misleading facts to the public, especially in crises. This chapter aims to underscore social media's existence and how it paves the way to smooth the flow of information and communication worldwide. By employing social media tools in their practices, both governments and businesses witness exceptional outcomes and acknowledge that social media laid the foundation for more effective communication. This chapter will also highlight social media’s disadvantages in increasing false information and inadequate facts that drive more uncertainty, sadness, anger, and lack of confidence among the public. It will also address the concept of crisis in general and focus on crisis management and crisis communication. Moreover, some countries will clarify the actions relevant to information filtering via prohibiting some popular websites and social media platforms. Furthermore, it will identify how governments and businesses deal with rumors in crisis, for example, COVID-19 outbreak, wars, financial scandals, business interruptions, and the like. Finally, the chapter will deliver the best practices that manage and control the fake information in social media and determine the best ways to spread accurate, reliable, and sufficient facts. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The Dark Side of Social Media: Spreading Misleading Information During COVID-19 Crisis