The Influence of Mass Media on Italian Web Users During COVID-19: An Infodemiological Analysis

Alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has had to face a growing infodemic, which has caused severe damage to economic and health systems and has often compromised the effectiveness of infection containment regulations. Although this has spread mainly through social media, there are numerous occasions in which the mass media have shared dangerous information, giving resonance to statements without a scientific basis. For these reasons, infoveillance and infodemiology methods are increasingly exploited to monitor online information traffic. The same tools have also been used to make epidemiological predictions. Among these, Google Trends - a service by GoogleTM that quantifies the web interest of users in the form of relative search volume - has often been adopted by the scientific community. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is to use Google Trends to estimate the impact of Italian mass media on users' web searches in order to understand the role of press and television channels in both the infodemic and the interest of Italian netizens on COVID-19. In conclusion, our results suggest that the Italian mass media have played a decisive role both in the spread of the infodemic and in addressing netizens' web interest, thus favoring the adoption of terms unsuitable for identifying the novel coronavirus (COVID- 19 disease). Therefore, it is highly advisable that the directors of news channels and newspapers be more cautious and government dissemination agencies exert more control over such news.