How perceiving oneself as an altruistic person can motivate one to spread misinformation on social media

Social media offers a mix of factual, contested, controversial, and misleading information on medicine and health-related issues. This study focuses on people who shared information that contradicted official information during the COVID-19 crisis in Denmark and uses the Meaning Maintenance Model to analyze how this made sense to them according to their self-perceived altruistic identity, and further how negative responses from people in their network made them join new networks of like-minded people in echo chambers. Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with people recruited from Facebook groups dedicated to COVID-19 protests. The informants were new to sharing news on social media and were all experiencing that friends and family turned their backs on them, and they were finding new social networks online dedicated to anti-Covid protests. The informants experienced negative feedback from their surroundings when they shared what they considered to be the truth, and they considered this a threat to their altruistic identity. This resulted in a meaning maintenance loop; they tried to restore meaning by insisting on their social and altruistic motives, but this resulted in more negative feedback from their surroundings. This led them to find new social networks online, dedicated to alternative health information.