Utility of YouTube as a source of information during health emergencies: COVID-19 pandemic case

Abstract

Introduction: YouTube is the most used social network in Latin America, and it constitutes an educational tool with great capacity for diffusion and influence in the community, both informatively and fraudulently. Objectives: Evaluate the reliability, quality, and usefulness or the information of the videos published in Spanish on YouTube about Covid-19, in order to evaluate the information that may reach the general population. Materials and methods: Cross-sectional study. A search is performed using the words coronavirus and Covid-19, the first hundred videos are analyzed simultaneously by two separate evaluators, according to metrics and standardized instruments. Results: 62,359,479 views were obtained, 95.76 % of the videos were informative and 41.52 % had health personnel as the publisher. The highest percentage of reliability score with mDISCERN scored 3 (35.59 %), in quality with GQS point 1 (38.98 %), and in utility with CSS scored 0 (25.42 %). Most of the videos and non-fraudulent information are generated by health personnel, obtaining better scores in relation to the metrics and GQS. Videos made by independent users were 5.8 times more likely to be misleading (p = 0.17). Conclusions: Most of the videos were informative, and only 0.85 % had misleading content, which contrasts with previous studies, where the highest
proportion of information was misleading. Maybe related to security strategies against “Fakes news”. Videos made by health professionals and government entities have a low probability of reproducing false information.