The words “misinformation,” “fake news,” and “post-truth” have filled social media posts. It is a serious social threat, especially post COVID-19. In this chapter, the authors provide bibliometric analysis of research on social media and its impact on social cognition. This can be useful for identifying gaps for future research in the field. Publication data was obtained from the Web of Science database using a search algorithm. A total of 22,935 articles were extracted, and 22,909 eligible articles were included for analysis. Document co-citation analysis revealed that themes on social engagement, fake news, problematic social media use, and healthcare emerged as trends on shaping the social cognition through social media. Further, India achieved 9th position on the list based on citations and 8th on centrality and did not appear on any of the top-10 lists based on Burst value and Sigma. This indicates that neither sudden trend-setting articles nor scientific novelty-based articles have been published in this domain thus far. There is a considerable research gap in India to counter misinformation.
TopIntroduction
Social media has gained considerable importance from the researchers in the field of Psychology as it has major impact on our emotion, behaviour and cognition in turn shaping our social cognition. Many researchers have reported a significant relationship between social media use and personality, relationship with family and friends (Babkirk et al., 2016). On the other hand, the social encounters play a vital role in shaping our social cognition. We can find fake information on trending issues such as conflicts between countries, new diseases, politics, and marketing (Knight & Tsoukas, 2019), which could have a significant impact on people’s decision making. Proliferation of social media applications facilitate communication between individuals, rapid knowledge dissemination (Ulaş, 2021) as well as misinformation (Allcott, Gentzkow & Yu, 2019) and disinformation, largely influences the social behaviour that governs a new social structure backed by the information technology (Yang, Zhang, Cheng & Zhao, 2023). Just for the business and political benefits, the business organizations and political Parties are also sharing information online which is fake or ambiguous have tendency to change the mindset of the people and they fail to verify the factual accuracy of the information (Oh, O., Agrawal, M., & Rao, H. R, 2013). Misinformation on social media could change the people’s attitudes towards the election and political party (Lazer, D.M.J., et al 2018). In 2016 US election, many adults were exposed to false stories about the political parties and which had a great impact on election. After this incident, the social media companies attempted to stop the spread of misinformation and came up with a policy but still Facebook is facing the challenges related to fake stories (NewsWhip, 2018).
During unforeseen circumstances, like COVID 19 people experience anxiety and due to lack of information from the concerned official sources, they collect information from social media platforms only. Irrespective of any age and gender, people consider social platforms are one of the important sources of information (Xiong F, Liu Y, 2014). Health professionals are also using the social media platforms to share information related to various health related aspects, diseases and treatment plans (Altevogt B, Stroud C, Hanson S, Hanfling D, Gostin LE. San 2009). In contrast to this, some researchers argue that false information about health may spread more easily than scientific knowledge through social media [Vosoughi S, Roy D, Aral S. 2018; Levy J, Strombeck R. 2002). According to WHO, 20-30% information related to infectious diseases in YouTube is inaccurate. (WHO, website)
According to embodied cognitive perspective, emerging technologies constantly re-negotiate our bodily (Clark, 2007) and restructure our cognitive capabilities (Smart, 2014). There is an emerging trend in the way how the web-based content and digital tools reconstruct our socially-distributed cognition. A research review provides the knowledge of dynamic development in current theories and offers an insight and uncover the areas that require attention (Bindu, Sankar & Kumar, 2019).
Ours is one of the early attempts to review the impact of social media on social cognition research on misinformation and we have worked on the following objectives;
- (a)
to analyze the previous researches to understand the impact of social media on social cognition.
- (b)
to identify the research trend, emerging from prior studies in regard to social media and social cognition.