The novel coronavirus 2019 pandemic has brought about an overabundance of misinformation concerning the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) it causes spreading rapidly on social media. While some more obviously untrustworthy sources may be easier for social media filters to identify and remove, an early feature was the cobranding of COVID-19 misinformation with other types of misinformation. To examine this, the top 10 Instagram posts (in English) were collected every day for 10 days (April 21–30th, 2020) for each of the hashtags #hoax, #governmentlies, and #plandemic. The #hoax was selected first as it is commonly used in conspiracy theory posts, and #governmentlies because it was the most commonly cotagged with #hoax. For comparison, we selected #plandemic as the most popular cotagged hashtag that was clearly COVID-19-related. This resulted in 300 Instagram posts available for our analysis. We conducted a content analysis by coding the themes contained in the posts, both for the images and the text caption shared by the Instagram users (including hashtags). The broad theme of general mistrust was the most common, including the idea that the government and/or media has fabricated or hidden information pertaining to COVID-19. Conspiracy theories were the second-most frequent theme among posts. Overall, COVID-19 was frequently presented in association with authority-questioning beliefs. Developing an understanding of how the public shares misinformation on COVID-19 alongside conspiracy theories and authority-questioning statements can aid public health officials and policymakers in limiting the spread of potentially life-threatening health misinformation.

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Instagram 信息流行病：阴谋论、2019 年冠状病毒病和权威质疑信念的联合品牌

2019 年新型冠状病毒大流行带来了大量有关该病毒 (SARS-CoV-2) 和其导致的 2019 年冠状病毒病 (COVID-19) 的错误信息，并在社交媒体上迅速传播。虽然社交媒体过滤器可能更容易识别和删除一些更明显不可信的来源，但早期特征是将 COVID-19 错误信息与其他类型的错误信息联合使用。为了检查这一点，我们每天收集了 10 天（2020 年 4 月 21 日至 30 日）的前 10 条 Instagram 帖子（英语），其中每个主题标签 #hoax、#governmentlies 和 #plandemic。首先选择#hoax 是因为它常用于阴谋论帖子，而#governmentlies 是因为它最常被标记为#hoax。为了比较，我们选择#plandemic 作为最受欢迎的 cotagged 标签，显然与 COVID-19 相关。这导致 300 个 Instagram 帖子可供我们分析。我们通过对帖子中包含的主题进行编码来进行内容分析，包括 Instagram 用户共享的图像和文本标题（包括主题标签）。普遍不信任的广泛主题是最常见的，包括政府和/或媒体捏造或隐藏与 COVID-19 相关的信息的想法。阴谋论是帖子中第二常见的主题。总体而言，COVID-19 经常与质疑权威的信念有关。