Social media and COVID-19 misinformation: how ignorant Facebook users are?

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed a lot of lives around the world, not only with the virus but also with misinformation. Many researchers have investigated COVID-19 misinformation, but none of them was related to social media users' diverse responses to different types of COVID-19 misinformation, which could be a timely exploration. To bridge this gap in scholarly literature, the present study based on 11,716 comments from 876 Facebook posts on five COVID-19 misinformation seeks to answer two relevant research questions: (a) How ignorant social media users are about misinformation? (b) How do they react to different types of misinformation? Following a quantitative content analysis method, this study produces a few novel findings. The results show that most of the users trust misinformation (60.88%), and fewer can deny (16.15%) or doubt (13.30%) the claims based on proper reasons. The acceptance of religious misinformation (94.72%) surpassed other types of misinformation. Most of the users react happily (34.50%) to misinformation: the users who accept misinformation are mostly happy (55.02%) because it may satisfy their expectations, and the users who distrust misinformation are mostly angry (44.05%) presuming it may cause harm to people. The chi-square and phi coefficient values show strong positive and significant associations between the themes, levels of ignorance, and reactions to misinformation. Some strengths, limitations, and ethical concerns of this study have also been discussed.