Development of the 12-Item Social Media Disinformation Scale and its Association With Social Media Addiction and Mental Health Related to COVID-19 in Tunisia: Survey-Based Pilot Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: In recent years, online disinformation has increased. Fake news has been spreading about the COVID-19 pandemic. Since January 2020, the culprits and antidotes to disinformation have been digital media and social media. OBJECTIVE: Our study aimed to develop and test the psychometric properties of the 12-item Social Media Disinformation Scale (SMDS-12), which assesses the consumption, confidence, and sharing of information related to COVID-19 by social media users. METHODS: A total of 874 subjects were recruited over two phases: the exploratory phase group had a mean age of 28.39 years (SD 9.32) and the confirmatory phase group had a mean age of 32.84 years (SD 12.72). Participants completed the SMDS-12, the Internet Addiction Test, the COVID-19 Fear Scale, and the 10-item Perceived Stress Scale. The SMDS-12 was initially tested by exploratory factor analysis and was subsequently tested by confirmatory factor analysis. RESULTS: The test supported the three-factor structure. In addition, no items were removed from the measurement scale, with three factors explaining up to 73.72% of the total variance, and the items had a lambda factor loading ranging from 0.73 to 0.85. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the robustness of the measure by referring to a wide range of goodness-of-fit indices that met the recommended standards. The construct validity of the scale was supported by its convergent and discriminant validity. The reliability of the instrument examined by means of three internal consistency indices, and the corrected item-total correlation, demonstrated that the three dimensions of the instrument were reliable: Cronbach α values were .89, .88, and .88 for the consumption, confidence, and sharing subscales, respectively. The corrected item-total correlation ranged from 0.70 to 0.78. The correlation of the instrument's dimensions with internet addiction and mental health factors showed positive associations. CONCLUSIONS: The SMDS-12 can be reliably utilized to measure the credibility of social media disinformation and can be adapted to measure the credibility of disinformation in other contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".