Preliminary development of the social media disinformation scale (SMDS-12) and its association with social media addiction and mental health: COVID-19 and related information seeking behaviors in Tunisia as a pilot case study.

Abstract

UNSTRUCTURED\nBackground: In recent years, online disinformation has increased. Fake news have been spreading about the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Since January 2020, the culprits and antidotes to disinformation have been digital and social media.Aims: Our study aimed to develop and test the psychometric properties of the SMDS-12 measurement scale which assesses the consumption, confidence, and sharing of information related to COVID-19 by social media users.Methods:A total of 874 subjects recruited over two exploratory (Mean age = 28.39, SD = 9.32) and confirmatory (Mean age = 32.84, SD = 12.72)periods, completed thesocial media disinformation scale (SMDS-12),the Internet addiction test (IAT), the COVID-19 fear scale, and the perceived stress questionnaire.The 12-item scale (SMDS-12 ) was initially tested by exploratory factor analysis and subsequently by confirmatory factor analysis..Results: The test supported the three-dimensional structure, in addition, no items were removed from the measurement scale, with three factors explaining up to 73.72% of the total variance, and with items having a lambda factor loading ranging from 0.73 to 0.85. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the robustness of the measure by referring to a wide range of goodness-of-fit indices that met the recommended standards. The construct validity of the scale has been proved by its convergent and discriminant validity.The reliability of the instrument examined by means of three internal consistency indices and the corrected item-total correlation demonstrated that the three dimensions of the instrument are reliable: Cronbach s α indices have values of 0.89, 0.88 and 0.88 for the Consumption, Confidence, and Sharing subscales, respectively.The corrected item-total correlation ranged from 0.70 to 0.78.The correlation between the instrument s dimensions with the internet addiction scale and mental health factors showed positive associations. Conclusion:The scale is eligible for measuring the credibility of disinformation and can be adapted to measure the credibility of social media disinformation in other contexts.