An infodemic is a rapid and far-reaching spread of both accurate and inaccurate information about certain issues. The word is a portmanteau of information and epidemic and is used as a metaphor to describe how misinformation and disinformation can spread like a virus from person to person and affect people like a disease. This term, originally coined in 2003 by David Rothkopf, rose to prominence in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
An infodemic is a rapid and far-reaching spread of both accurate and inaccurate information about certain issues. The word is a portmanteau of information and epidemic and is used as a metaphor to describe how misinformation and disinformation can spread like a virus from person to person and affect people like a disease. This term, originally coined in 2003 by David Rothkopf, rose to prominence in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
==History== In his 11 May 2003 article in The Washington Postalso published in Newsday, The Record of New Jersey, the Oakland Tribune, and the China Dailyforeign policy expert David Rothkopf, referred to the information epidemicor "infodemic", in the context of the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak. The outbreak of SARS, which was caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 1 began in a remote region in Guangdong, China, in November 2002. By the time the outbreak ended in May 2003, it had reached 30 countries and there were over 8,000 confirmed cases and 774 deaths.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).