Misinformation, Social Media and the Pandemic Crisis: Challenging the Return to a Powerful Media Effects Paradigm

The paper draws on systematic and scoping reviews of pre- and post-COVID-19 medical, public health and science communication empirical research to show how the current dominant approch to social media fake news represents a revamed repoposition of the strong media effects paradigm. It then draws on different approaches within the media studies tradition – mainly, audience studies – to highlight what seem to be the main limitations of the currently dominant "epidemic" paradigm.