June 19, 2020 Survey Report on COVID-19 Information Distribution

1. Overview

In recent years, false or misleading information on COVID-19 has been generated and spread, and there is concern that damage will spread in the future. With consideration of these circumstances, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has conducted a survey to understand the current state of information distribution on COVID-19.
MIC has compiled the survey report and decided to open the report to the public.

2. Published material

• Survey Report on COVID-19 Information Distribution

3. Report outline

• *
  Survey outline and target: Males and females aged 15 to 69 who usually use the Internet for at least one day per week (except when using it for schoolwork or occupational work).

• Number of samples: 2,000
• Survey method: Web survey
• Implementation period: Wednesday, May 13, 2020, to Thursday, May 14, 2020

Survey results

• More than 95% of people or about 20% of people, respectively, see or hear information and news about novel coronavirus infectious disease at least once a day or ten times a day.
• Media or services that provide information and news on novel coronavirus infectious diseases showing the highest audience ratings are commercial broadcasting (71.6%), Yahoo! News (62.6%), and NHK (50.5%).
• Reliable information sources and media, services ranked high are NHK (43.7%), the government (40.1%), and private broadcasting (38.0%).
• Approximately three out of four people come across false or misleading information on COVID-19.
• There is a tendency that a relatively large number of people could not judge the authenticity of information on COVID-19.
• People who believed false or misleading information on COVID-19 to be correct and have shared or disseminated such information are 35.5% of those who saw or heard such information (19.5% of all).
• On a service-by-service or media-by-media basis, those who have seen false or misleading information that was introduced as true or dubious information on COVID-19 respond that on Twitter (57.0%) and blogs and summary sites (36.5%) as information sources.

Direction expected from the results

• Broadcast media is not only highly used and considered reliable as a source of information on COVID-19, but also as a way for a high percentage of people to verify the authentication of information and filter out suspicious information, false information, or misleading information.
  Therefore, broadcast media is expected to continue to play an important role as news media.
• News-related application websites are highly used as information sources for COVID-19 and are required to play important news media roles.
  On the other hand, since their reliability is relatively low compared to the high usage rate, it is expected that measures will be taken to increase the reliability.
• The government sends exceptionally reliable information on COVID-19, but people’s usage of the government’s information is low. It is necessary to improve the usage rate by devising an information distribution method.
• SNS has a low reputation for its handling on the distribution of information on COVID-19. It is expected to implement measures, including those for reliability and transparency improvements and the delivery of fact-check results, improving reliability, improving transparency, and delivering fact check results.
• It is found that the population ratio of younger people tending to believe or disseminate false or misleading information was higher than that of other generations. Therefore, it is necessary to enhance efforts to improve literacy, especially for younger people.