Framing the COVID-19 “Infodemic”: A Qualitative Content Analysis of WHO Policy Documents (2020–2022)

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by what the World Health Organization (WHO) calls a “COVID-19 infodemic”: an overabundance of information, some accurate and some not, that circulates in digital and physical spaces during a disease outbreak. This excess of information can create confusion, undermine trust in health authorities, and make it harder for people to find reliable guidance and adopt protective behaviours (World Health Organization). In response, WHO promotes “infodemic management”, understood as the application of evidence-based interventions to provide clear, locally relevant information and to support positive health-seeking behaviour. Infodemic management is presented as an essential component of contemporary public health and is said to require a whole-of-society approach involving governments, health systems, communities, media and digital platforms (World Health Organization).

Academic research has begun to formalise this agenda. Tangcharoensathien et al. (2020) conceptualise the COVID-19 infodemic as a systemic challenge linked to the volume, speed and reach of information flows, and propose a multidimensional framework that includes monitoring information, explaining scientific evidence, amplifying reliable messages and strengthening societal resilience. Empirical work shows how COVID-19-related information and misinformation spread rapidly across platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Reddit, sometimes following epidemic-like dynamics and shaping public responses to containment measures (Cinelli et al., 2020). More recent contributions argue that infodemics should be addressed through an “upstream” public-health approach that tackles structural drivers of misinformation and information inequality (Ishizumi et al., 2024).

WHO has been central in shaping how the infodemic is understood. This study focuses on three key WHO policy texts and asks: How does the World Health Organization (WHO) frame the “COVID-19 infodemic” and allocate responsibilities to states and other actors in its key infodemic-management policy documents issued between 2020 and 2022?

Literature Review and Research Gap

The concept of a “COVID-19 infodemic” has been developed both by WHO and by academic authors. WHO describes an infodemic as an overabundance of information, accurate and inaccurate, that circulates during a disease outbreak and makes it harder for people to find trustworthy guidance and adopt protective behaviours (World Health Organization). Building on this, Tangcharoensathien et al. (2020) define the infodemic as a flood of information linked to an epidemic, stressing that the volume, speed and ubiquity of information flows can disrupt risk communication and weaken public-health responses. Concept-analysis work by Choi et al. (2024) further clarifies the notion by distinguishing the infodemic from misinformation and disinformation and presenting it as a broader systemic phenomenon shaped by digital platforms, media ecosystems and socio-political contexts. In this view, the infodemic is not only about “false information” but also about information overload, uncertainty and trust.

Alongside definitional debates, several frameworks for managing the COVID-19 infodemic have been proposed. Drawing on a large online technical consultation organised by WHO’s EPI-WIN network, Tangcharoensathien et al. (2020) assemble nearly 600 suggestions for action into a preliminary framework with key infodemic-management areas, such as scanning and verifying evidence, explaining the science, amplifying reliable messages, measuring the infodemic and its impacts, and developing coordination and governance mechanisms. The authors also formulate policy implications, including the need for science-based communication, partnerships with digital platforms and investment in socio-behavioural research. Eysenbach (2020) offers a complementary model of four “pillars” of infodemic management: information monitoring (“infoveillance”), promotion of eHealth and science literacy, refinement and quality improvement of knowledge, and translation of knowledge into practice. Together, these contributions conceptualise infodemic management as a multidimensional set of activities that combine technical monitoring, communication, education and governance, and they provide sensitising concepts, such as monitoring, literacy and resilience, that can guide empirical analysis. A third strand of literature treats infodemics as a public-health and governance challenge. Calleja et al. (2021) develop a public-health research agenda for managing infodemics, identifying key work-streams including social listening, intervention design and evaluation, and the building of resilient information ecosystems. They argue that infodemics should be addressed systematically, drawing on epidemiology, behavioural science and data science. Ishizumi et al. (2024) go further by calling for an “upstream” public-health approach that addresses structural drivers of infodemics, such as information inequalities, historical mistrust and power imbalances, rather than focusing only on correcting false claims. Scales (2021) similarly conceptualises the COVID-19 infodemic as a governance problem and uses the epidemiological model to think about how misinformation spreads and how interventions by international organisations, states, platforms and civil society might reduce its “reproduction number”. This work highlights that infodemic management is not merely a technical communication task but also a question of how authority, responsibility and trust are organised in global health governance.

Empirical studies analyse how misinformation about COVID-19 circulates and how different actors respond. Cinelli et al. (2020) examine several social-media platforms and show that COVID-19 information diffuses with patterns similar to epidemic processes, with notable differences across platforms in engagement and the prevalence of unreliable sources. Review articles synthesise the evidence on mechanisms, impacts and counter-measures. For example, Sharma and Sharma (2022) survey the literature on COVID-19 infodemics and document psychological and behavioural effects of exposure to misinformation, such as confusion, anxiety and resistance to public-health measures, as well as counter-strategies including fact-checking, media literacy initiatives and regulatory efforts. Framing analyses, such as that by Mohammadi et al. (2022), explore how misinformation stories about COVID-19 are constructed in media narratives, identifying frames centred on conspiracy, fear and distrust and showing how these shape perceptions of legitimacy and responsibility. However, these studies focus mainly on media and social-media content rather than on the policy documents of international organisations. Taken together, this literature provides definitions and concept analyses of the infodemic (Choi et al., 2024), frameworks for infodemic management (Tangcharoensathien et al., 2020; Eysenbach, 2020), public-health research agendas and structural approaches (Calleja et al., 2021; Ishizumi et al., 2024), and empirical analyses of misinformation dynamics and interventions (Cinelli et al., 2020; Sharma & Sharma, 2022; Mohammadi et al., 2022; Scales, 2021). It shows that infodemics are now recognised as a major challenge for public health and global governance. However, there is relatively little systematic qualitative analysis of WHO’s own policy documents as primary data. WHO’s call for action on managing the COVID-19 infodemic (World Health Organization, 2020a), the 2020 joint statement on promoting healthy behaviours and mitigating harm from misinformation (World Health Organization, 2020b), and the 2022 policy brief on COVID-19 infodemic management (World Health Organization, 2022) are widely cited as reference documents, but they are rarely examined in depth as texts that construct the infodemic and assign responsibilities across states, digital platforms, health professionals, citizens and WHO itself.

This research addresses that gap by using these three WHO documents as a corpus for qualitative content analysis. It investigates how WHO frames the infodemic, its causes, consequences and urgency, and how it allocates responsibilities among different actors. In doing so, the study contributes to the infodemic-management literature and to debates on global health governance by showing how an international organisation uses policy documents to exercise knowledge and normative authority over information environments during a health emergency.

Theory

This research combines infodemic-management frameworks with framing theory to analyse how WHO constructs the COVID-19 infodemic and allocates responsibilities in its policy documents.

First, it draws on existing infodemic-management frameworks as sensitising concepts. Based on a large WHO technical consultation, Tangcharoensathien et al. (2020) propose a framework that groups suggested actions into several key areas, including scanning and verifying evidence, explaining the science, amplifying reliable messages, measuring the infodemic and its impacts, and developing coordination and governance mechanisms. This framework highlights the multidimensional nature of infodemic management and the need to combine technical monitoring, communication and governance. Similarly, Eysenbach (2020) identifies four “pillars” of infodemic management: information monitoring (“infoveillance”), promotion of eHealth and science literacy, refinement and quality improvement of knowledge, and knowledge translation into practice. These frameworks provide categories, such as monitoring, literacy, knowledge refinement and coordination, that will inform the coding of WHO documents and help to identify which dimensions of infodemic management are emphasised or downplayed.

Second, the study uses framing theory to structure the analysis of WHO’s policy texts. Framing theory suggests that policy actors construct issues by defining what the problem is, diagnosing its causes, making normative evaluations and proposing remedies. In their framing analysis of COVID-19 misinformation stories, Mohammadi et al. (2022) show how media narratives organise information around themes such as conspiracy, fear and distrust, and how these frames shape perceptions of legitimacy and responsibility. Adapting this approach to policy documents, the present research focuses on four framing dimensions: problem definition (how the infodemic is described and why it matters), causal attribution (which factors and actors are presented as causing or amplifying the infodemic), proposed solutions (what types of interventions are advocated) and responsibility attribution (who is expected to act and in what ways).

Third, the analysis is informed by debates on international organisations as knowledge and normative authorities in global governance. WHO does not only provide technical guidance; it also contributes to defining what counts as a public-health problem and which actors are responsible for addressing it. In the infodemic context, WHO’s policy documents can be seen as attempts to stabilise a particular understanding of information disorders and to set expectations for how states, platforms, health professionals and citizens should behave. Examining the frames used in these documents therefore offers insight into how WHO exercises authority over information environments during health emergencies.

On this basis, the study advances three theoretical expectations. First, WHO’s documents are expected to promote a “whole-of-society” approach, presenting infodemic management as a shared responsibility among governments, health authorities, digital platforms, media organisations and communities, rather than as the task of any single actor (Tangcharoensathien et al., 2020; World Health Organization, 2020a). Second, it is anticipated that the 2022 policy brief will place greater emphasis on resilience, trust and long-term capacity building than the 2020 texts, which are likely to focus more on immediate crisis response (World Health Organization, 2020a, 2022; Ishizumi et al., 2024). Third, WHO’s framing is expected to combine technical language about monitoring, data analysis and digital tools with normative language concerning equity, participation and inclusion, reflecting its dual role as a provider of scientific guidance and a normative standard-setter in global health governance (Calleja et al., 2021; World Health Organization). These expectations guide the analysis while remaining open to revision in light of the empirical findings.

Methodology

This research adopts a qualitative research design based on qualitative content analysis of policy documents. Qualitative content analysis is appropriate because it allows for a systematic yet interpretive examination of texts, focusing on patterns of meaning and their relationship to a research question (Schreier, 2012; Krippendorff, 2013). Rather than counting words or phrases in a purely quantitative way, the aim is to develop a structured coding frame that captures how the infodemic is framed and how responsibilities are allocated across different actors in WHO’s policy documents.

The empirical corpus consists of three key WHO documents on COVID-19 infodemic management. The first is an ad hoc WHO technical consultation managing the COVID-19 infodemic: call for action, 7–8 April 2020 (World Health Organization, 2020a). This report summarises the outcomes of a global technical consultation and formulates a series of recommended actions. The second is the joint statement Managing the COVID-19 infodemic: Promoting healthy behaviours and mitigating the harm from misinformation and disinformation, issued in September 2020 by WHO and several partner organisations (World Health Organization, 2020b). The third is the WHO policy brief: COVID-19 infodemic management published in 2022 (World Health Organization, 2022). Together, these three documents span the early and more mature stages of WHO’s thinking on infodemic management and are widely cited in both policy and academic debates.

This corpus is chosen for three main reasons. First, the documents are official WHO guidance and advocacy texts that explicitly address the infodemic and propose strategies for managing it, making them directly relevant to the research question. Second, they cover the period from 2020 to 2022, allowing for a comparison between initial crisis-oriented responses and later, more institutionalised guidance. Third, the texts differ in genre, a technical consultation report, a political joint statement and a policy brief, offering an opportunity to explore how framing and responsibility attribution may vary across formats while remaining within a coherent set of WHO outputs.

The unit of analysis will be paragraphs or thematically coherent segments (for example, bullet-point recommendations). The analysis will proceed in two main coding phases. In the first, inductive phase, all three documents will be read carefully and open coding will be used to identify recurring themes related to problem framing, perceived causes of the infodemic, proposed interventions and actor responsibilities. In the second, more deductive phase, a coding frame will be developed that combines these emergent themes with categories derived from the conceptual framework, including infodemic-management pillars and action areas (monitoring, literacy, coordination, resilience) (Tangcharoensathien et al., 2020; Eysenbach, 2020) and framing dimensions (problem definition, causal attribution, solutions and responsibility attribution) (Mohammadi et al., 2022).

Reliability will be supported by constructing a clear codebook that defines each code and by piloting the coding frame on selected sections of the documents before applying it to the full corpus, revising categories where necessary to improve clarity and consistency (Schreier, 2012; Krippendorff, 2013). Validity will be strengthened by grounding the categories in established infodemic-management frameworks and framing theory, and by maintaining a close link between the coding frame and the research question. Ethical concerns are minimal, as the data consist of publicly available institutional documents with no identifiable human participants. Finally, I will seek to minimise my own bias by being reflexive about my position and by using a transparent, systematic and well-documented analytical procedure.

Analysis

Once the qualitative content analysis has been completed, the first step will be to examine how the main codes are distributed across the three WHO documents. In particular, the analysis will look at the co-occurrence of (a) problem-framing codes (e.g. confusion, mistrust, harmful behaviours), (b) infodemic-management actions (e.g. monitoring, literacy, partnerships, community engagement), and (c) actor-responsibility codes (e.g. states, WHO, digital platforms, health professionals, citizens) within the same paragraphs or sections. This will make it possible to identify which combinations of problems, actions and responsible actors are most frequently promoted as part of WHO’s approach to managing the COVID-19 infodemic.

Patterns in these co-occurrences will then be compared across the 2020 call for action, the 2020 joint statement and the 2022 policy brief. By charting how often particular actors are linked to specific types of actions in each document, the analysis will show, for example, whether states are primarily associated with regulatory and coordination measures, whether platforms are mainly linked to content moderation and algorithmic changes, and whether citizens and communities are mostly addressed through literacy and empowerment strategies. Differences between documents and over time will also be explored, for instance by assessing whether references to long-term capacity building, resilience and trust become more prominent in the 2022 policy brief than in the earlier 2020 texts.

With these results, it will be possible to assess both continuity and change in WHO’s framing of infodemic management. It is expected that the analysis will confirm a consistent “whole-of-society” framing, in which the infodemic is presented as a shared responsibility of multiple actors rather than a problem to be solved by WHO alone. At the same time, the frequency and context of specific codes are likely to show a gradual shift from emergency-oriented measures in 2020 (such as urgent communication and rapid monitoring) towards more structural concerns in 2022, including building institutional capacities, strengthening community resilience and integrating infodemic management into routine public-health practice.

These findings will not only describe how WHO talks about managing the infodemic, but will also allow a reflection on what this framing implies for WHO’s position in global health governance. If the documents consistently place WHO at the centre of coordination, standard-setting and knowledge production, the research will support the view that infodemic management is one of the arenas through which WHO exercises knowledge and normative authority, and shapes expectations about how states, platforms and other actors should govern information during health emergencies.

References

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• World Health Organization. (2022). WHO policy brief: COVID-19 infodemic management. 14 September 2022.