The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is a global pandemic with community circulation in many countries, including the U.S. where every state is reporting confirmed cases. The course of this pandemic will be largely shaped by how governments enact timely policies, disseminate the information, and most importantly, how the public reacts to them. Here, we examine informationseeking responses to the first COVID-19 case public announcement in a state. By using an eventstudy framework, we show that such news increases collective attention to the crisis right away, but the elevated level of attention is short-lived, even though the initial announcements were followed by increasingly strong measures. We find that people respond to the first report of COVID-19 in their state by immediately seeking information about COVID-19, as measured by searches for coronavirus, coronavirus symptoms and hand sanitizer. On the other hand, searches for information regarding community level policies (e.g., quarantine, school closures, testing), or personal health strategies (e.g., masks, grocery delivery, over-the-counter medications) do not appear to be immediately triggered by first reports. These results are encouraging given our study period is relatively early in the epidemic and more elaborate policy responses were not yet part of the public discourse. Further analysis will track evolving patterns of responses to subsequent flows of public information.
We present analyses from a real-time information monitoring system of online local news in the U.S. We study relationships among online local news coverage of COVID, cases and deaths in an area, and properties of local news outlets and their audiences. Our analysis relies on a unique dataset of the online content of over 300 local news outlets, encompassing over 750,000 articles over a period of 10 months spanning April 2020 to February 2021. We find that the rate of COVID coverage over time by local news outlets was primarily associated with death rates at the national level, but that this ef…
The COVID-19 epidemic is considered as the global health crisis of the whole society and the greatest challenge mankind faced since World War Two. Unfortunately, the fake news about COVID-19 is spreading as fast as the virus itself. The incorrect health measurements, anxiety, and hate speeches will have bad consequences on people's physical health, as well as their mental health in the whole world. To help better combat the COVID-19 fake news, we propose a new fake news detection dataset MM-COVID(Multilingual and Multidimensional COVID-19 Fake News Data Repository). This dataset provides the m…
It has been suggested that online search and retrieval contributes to the intellectual isolation of users within their preexisting ideologies, where people's prior views are strengthened and alternative viewpoints are infrequently encountered. This so-called "filter bubble" phenomenon has been called out as especially detrimental when it comes to dialog among people on controversial, emotionally charged topics, such as the labeling of genetically modified food, the right to bear arms, the death penalty, and online privacy. We seek to identify and study information-seeking behavior and access t…
Our opinions and views of life can be shaped by how we perceive the opinions of others on social media like Facebook. This dependence has increased during COVID-19 periods when we have fewer means to connect with others. However, fake news related to COVID-19 has become a significant problem on Facebook. Bengali is the seventh most spoken language worldwide, yet we are aware of no previous research that studied the prevalence of COVID-19 related fake news in Bengali on Facebook. In this paper, we develop machine learning models to detect fake news in Bengali automatically. The best performing …
As COVID-19 quickly became one of the most concerned global crisis, the demand for data in academic research is also increasing. Currently, there are several open access Twitter datasets, but none of them is dedicated to the institutional and news media Twitter data collection, to fill this blank, we retrieved data from 69 institutional/news media Twitter accounts, 17 of them were related to government and international organizations, 52 of them were news media across North America, Europe and Asia. We believe our open access data can provide researchers more availability to conduct social sci…
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, news outlets and social media have become central tools for disseminating and consuming information. Because of their ease of access, users seek COVID-19-related information from online social media (i.e., online news) and news outlets (i.e., offline news). Online and offline news are often connected, sharing common topics while each has unique, different topics. A gap between these two news sources can lead to misinformation propagation. For instance, according to the Guardian, most COVID-19 misinformation comes from users on social media. Without fact…
In this paper, we present a first multilingual cross-domain dataset of 5182 fact-checked news articles for COVID-19, collected from 04/01/2020 to 15/05/2020. We have collected the fact-checked articles from 92 different fact-checking websites after obtaining references from Poynter and Snopes. We have manually annotated articles into 11 different categories of the fact-checked news according to their content. The dataset is in 40 languages from 105 countries. We have built a classifier to detect fake news and present results for the automatic fake news detection and its class. Our model achiev…
IIIT Sri City（印度国际信息技术学院斯里城校区）；IIIT Delhi（德里国际信息技术学院）；IIT Patna（巴特那印度理工学院）
Along with COVID-19 pandemic we are also fighting an `infodemic'. Fake news and rumors are rampant on social media. Believing in rumors can cause significant harm. This is further exacerbated at the time of a pandemic. To tackle this, we curate and release a manually annotated dataset of 10,700 social media posts and articles of real and fake news on COVID-19. We benchmark the annotated dataset with four machine learning baselines - Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boost, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). We obtain the best performance of 93.46% F1-score with SVM. The data and code…
The outburst and proliferation of the COVID-19 pandemic, together with the subsequent social distancing measures, have raised massive challenges in almost all domains of public and private life around the globe. The stay-at-home movement has pushed the news audiences into social networks, which, in turn, has become the most prolific field for receiving and sharing news updates, as well as for public expression of opinions, concerns and feelings about the pandemic. Public opinion is a critical aspect in analysing how the information and events impact peoples lives, and research has shown that s…
There is a lot of fact-based information and misinformation in the online discourses and discussions about the COVID-19 vaccines. Using a sample of nearly four million geotagged English tweets and the data from the CDC COVID Data Tracker, we conducted the Fama-MacBeth regression with the Newey-West adjustment to understand the influence of both misinformation and fact-based news on Twitter on the COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the U.S. from April 19 when U.S. adults were vaccine eligible to June 30, 2021, after controlling state-level factors such as demographics, education, and the pandemic sever…
COVID-19 has impacted all lives. To maintain social distancing and avoiding exposure, works and lives have gradually moved online. Under this trend, social media usage to obtain COVID-19 news has increased. Also, misinformation on COVID-19 is frequently spread on social media. In this work, we develop CHECKED, the first Chinese dataset on COVID-19 misinformation. CHECKED provides a total 2,104 verified microblogs related to COVID-19 from December 2019 to August 2020, identified by using a specific list of keywords. Correspondingly, CHECKED includes 1,868,175 reposts, 1,185,702 comments, and 56…
First identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, the outbreak of COVID-19 has been declared as a global emergency in January, and a pandemic in March 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO). Along with this pandemic, we are also experiencing an "infodemic" of information with low credibility such as fake news and conspiracies. In this work, we present ReCOVery, a repository designed and constructed to facilitate research on combating such information regarding COVID-19. We first broadly search and investigate ~2,000 news publishers, from which 60 are identified with extreme [high or low…
When people notice something unusual, they discuss it on social media. They leave traces of their emotions via text expressions. A systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of social media data across time and space can give insights on local outbreaks, mental health, and social issues. Such timely insights can help in developing strategies and resources with an appropriate and efficient response. This study analysed a large Spatio-temporal tweet dataset of the Australian sphere related to COVID19. The methodology included a volume analysis, dynamic topic modelling, sentiment detecti…
The COVID-19 pandemic is having a serious adverse impact on the lives of people across the world. COVID-19 has exacerbated community-wide depression, and has led to increased drug abuse brought about by isolation of individuals as a result of lockdown. Further, apart from providing informative content to the public, the incessant media coverage of COVID-19 crisis in terms of news broadcasts, published articles and sharing of information on social media have had the undesired snowballing effect on stress levels (further elevating depression and drug use) due to uncertain future. In this positio…
As the COVID-19 virus quickly spreads around the world, unfortunately, misinformation related to COVID-19 also gets created and spreads like wild fire. Such misinformation has caused confusion among people, disruptions in society, and even deadly consequences in health problems. To be able to understand, detect, and mitigate such COVID-19 misinformation, therefore, has not only deep intellectual values but also huge societal impacts. To help researchers combat COVID-19 health misinformation, therefore, we present CoAID (Covid-19 heAlthcare mIsinformation Dataset), with diverse COVID-19 healthc…
People turn to search engines and social media to seek information during population-level events, such as during civil unrest, disease outbreaks, fires, or flood. They also tend to participate in discussions and disseminate information and opinions via social media forums, and smartphone messaging applications. COVID-19 pandemic was not any different. However, the proper medical awareness and correct information dissemination is critical during a pandemic. An unprecedented amount of internet traffic related to this topic was generated during the start of the pandemic all over the world. In th…
Saginaw Valley State University（萨吉诺谷州立大学）；The Hashemite University（哈希姆大学）；Western Michigan University（西密歇根大学）；University of Nebraska at Kearney（内布拉斯加大学卡尼尔分校）
Online news and information sources are convenient and accessible ways to learn about current issues. For instance, more than 300 million people engage with posts on Twitter globally, which provides the possibility to disseminate misleading information. There are numerous cases where violent crimes have been committed due to fake news. This research presents the CovidMis20 dataset (COVID-19 Misinformation 2020 dataset), which consists of 1,375,592 tweets collected from February to July 2020. CovidMis20 can be automatically updated to fetch the latest news and is publicly available at: https://…
The global COVID-19 pandemic has led to the online proliferation of health-, political-, and conspiratorial-based misinformation. Understanding the reach and belief in this misinformation is vital to managing this crisis, as well as future crises. The results from our global survey finds a troubling reach of and belief in COVID-related misinformation, as well as a correlation with those that primarily consume news from social media, and, in the United States, a strong correlation with political leaning.
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所（哈马德·本·哈利法大学））；University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）
While COVID-19 vaccines are finally becoming widely available, a second pandemic that revolves around the circulation of anti-vaxxer fake news may hinder efforts to recover from the first one. With this in mind, we performed an extensive analysis of Arabic and English tweets about COVID-19 vaccines, with focus on messages originating from Qatar. We found that Arabic tweets contain a lot of false information and rumors, while English tweets are mostly factual. However, English tweets are much more propagandistic than Arabic ones. In terms of propaganda techniques, about half of the Arabic tweet…
University of Turin（都灵大学）；University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）
Since their announcement in November 2020, COVID-19 vaccines were largely debated by the press and social media. With most studies focusing on COVID-19 disinformation in social media, little attention has been paid to how mainstream news outlets framed COVID-19 narratives compared to alternative sources. To fill this gap, we use cognitive network science and natural language processing to reconstruct time-evolving semantic and emotional frames of 5745 Italian news, that were massively re-shared on Facebook and Twitter, about COVID-19 vaccines. We found consistently high levels of trust/anticip…
False information spreads on social media, and fact-checking is a potential countermeasure. However, there is a severe shortage of fact-checkers; an efficient way to scale fact-checking is desperately needed, especially in pandemics like COVID-19. In this study, we focus on spontaneous debunking by social media users, which has been missed in existing research despite its indicated usefulness for fact-checking and countering false information. Specifically, we characterize the tweets with false information, or fake tweets, that tend to be debunked and Twitter users who often debunk fake tweets…
Comilla University（库米拉大学）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Newspapers are trustworthy media where people get the most reliable and credible information compared with other sources. On the other hand, social media often spread rumors and misleading news to get more traffic and attention. Careful characterization, evaluation, and interpretation of newspaper data can provide insight into intrigue and passionate social issues to monitor any big social incidence. This study analyzed a large set of spatio-temporal Bangladeshi newspaper data related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The methodology included volume analysis, topic analysis, automated classification, …
The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the spread of misinformation on social media and the Web as a whole. The phenomenon dubbed `infodemic' has taken the challenges of information veracity and trust to new heights by massively introducing seemingly scientific and technical elements into misleading content. Despite the existing body of work on modeling and predicting misinformation, the coverage of very complex scientific topics with inherent uncertainty and an evolving set of findings, such as COVID-19, provides many new challenges that are not easily solved by existing tools. To address these iss…
Underscore（Underscore公司）；KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
Vaccine adverse events have been presumed to be a relatively objective measure that is immune to political polarization. The real-world data, however, shows the correlation between presidential disapproval ratings and the subjective severity of adverse events. This paper investigates the partisan bias in COVID vaccine adverse events coverage with language models that can classify the topic of vaccine-related articles and the political disposition of news comments. Based on 90K news articles from 52 major newspaper companies, we found that conservative media are inclined to report adverse event…
The pandemic required efficient allocation of public resources and transforming existing ways of societal functions. To manage any crisis, governments and public health researchers exploit the information available to them in order to make informed decisions, also defined as situational awareness. Gathering situational awareness using social media has been functional to manage epidemics. Previous research focused on using discussions during periods of epidemic crises on social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook and developing NLP techniques to filter out relevant discussions fro…
The exposure and consumption of information during epidemic outbreaks may alter risk perception, trigger behavioural changes, and ultimately affect the evolution of the disease. It is thus of the uttermost importance to map information dissemination by mainstream media outlets and public response. However, our understanding of this exposure-response dynamic during COVID-19 pandemic is still limited. In this paper, we provide a characterization of media coverage and online collective attention to COVID-19 pandemic in four countries: Italy, United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. For this pur…
The COVID-19 pandemic has gained worldwide attention and allowed fake news, such as ``COVID-19 is the flu,'' to spread quickly and widely on social media. Combating this coronavirus infodemic demands effective methods to detect fake news. To this end, we propose a method to infer news credibility from hashtags involved in news dissemination on social media, motivated by the tight connection between hashtags and news credibility observed in our empirical analyses. We first introduce a new graph that captures all (direct and \textit{indirect}) relationships among hashtags. Then, a language-indep…
We present and begin to explore a collection of social data that represents part of the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on the United States. This data is collected from a range of sources and includes longitudinal trends of news topics, social distancing behaviors, community mobility changes, web searches, and more. This multimodal effort enables new opportunities for analyzing the impacts such a pandemic has on the pulse of society. Our preliminary results show that the number of COVID-19-related news articles published immediately after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic on Mar…
Vaccinations play a critical role in mitigating the impact of COVID-19 and other diseases. This study explores COVID-19 vaccine misinformation circulating on Twitter during 2021, when vaccines were being released to the public in an effort to mitigate the global pandemic. Our findings show a low prevalence of low-credibility information compared to mainstream news. However, most popular low-credibility sources had larger reshare volumes than authoritative sources such as the CDC and WHO. We observed an increasing trend in the prevalence of low-credibility news relative to mainstream news about…
The rise of social media has ignited an unprecedented circulation of false information in our society. It is even more evident in times of crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Fact-checking efforts have expanded greatly and have been touted as among the most promising solutions to fake news, especially in times like these. Several studies have reported the development of fact-checking organizations in Western societies, albeit little attention has been given to the Global South. Here, to fill this gap, we introduce a novel Markov-inspired computational method for identifying topics in tweets…
Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confidence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the Covid-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of any authoritative scientific consensus on the virus, its spread and containment, or on the long term social and economic ramifications of the pandemic. Among the stories currently circulating are ones suggesting that the 5G network activates the virus, that the pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by a global cabal, that the virus is a bio-weapon released deliberately by the Chinese, or that Bill Gates…
The University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）
COVID-19 impacted every part of the world, although the misinformation about the outbreak traveled faster than the virus. Misinformation spread through online social networks (OSN) often misled people from following correct medical practices. In particular, OSN bots have been a primary source of disseminating false information and initiating cyber propaganda. Existing work neglects the presence of bots that act as a catalyst in the spread and focuses on fake news detection in 'articles shared in posts' rather than the post (textual) content. Most work on misinformation detection uses manually …
Vaccines are promising tools to control the spread of COVID-19. An effective vaccination campaign requires government policies and community engagement, sharing experiences for social support, and voicing concerns to vaccine safety and efficiency. The increasing use of online social platforms allows us to trace large-scale communication and infer public opinion in real-time. We collected more than 100 million vaccine-related tweets posted by 8 million users and used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model to perform automated topic modeling of tweet texts during the vaccination campaign in Japan…
Online social media (OSM) has emerged as a prominent platform for debate on a wide range of issues. Even celebrities and public figures often share their opinions on a variety of topics through OSM platforms. One such subject that has gained a lot of coverage on Twitter is the Novel Coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19, which has become a pandemic and has sparked a crisis in human history. In this study, we examine 29 million tweets over three months to study highly influential users, whom we refer to as leaders. We recognize these leaders through social network techniques and analyze the…
Users online tend to consume information adhering to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, users get exposed to a massive amount of information about a new topic having a high level of uncertainty. In this paper, we analyze two social media that enforced opposite moderation methods, Twitter and Gab, to assess the interplay between news consumption and content regulation concerning COVID-19. We compare the two platforms on about three million pieces of content analyzing user interaction with respect to news articles. We first describe users'…
COVID-19 has hugely changed our lives, work, and interactions with people. With more and more online activities, people are easily exposed to privacy threats. In this paper, we explore how users self-disclose on social media and privacy concerns raised from these behaviors. Based on recent news, techniques, and research, we indicate three increasing privacy threats caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. After that, we provide a systematic analysis of potential privacy issues related to the COVID pandemic. Furthermore, we propose a series of research directions about online user self-disclosure and p…
In Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the critical term is paradigm-shift when it suddenly becomes evident that earlier assumptions no longer are correct and the plurality of the scientific community that studies this domain accepts the change. These types of events can be scientific findings or as in social science system shock that creates a punctured equilibrium that sets the stage in the developments. In information warfare, recent years studies and government lines of efforts have been to engage fake news, electoral interference, and fight extremist social media as the primar…
The COVID-19 pandemic, like many of the disease outbreaks that have preceded it, is likely to have a profound effect on mental health. Understanding its impact can inform strategies for mitigating negative consequences. In this work, we seek to better understand the effects of COVID-19 on mental health by examining discussions within mental health support communities on Reddit. First, we quantify the rate at which COVID-19 is discussed in each community, or subreddit, in order to understand levels of preoccupation with the pandemic. Next, we examine the volume of activity in order to determine…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first global infodemic have changed our lives in many different ways. We relied on social media to get the latest information about the COVID-19 pandemic and at the same time to disseminate information. The content in social media consisted not only health related advises, plans, and informative news from policy makers, but also contains conspiracies and rumors. It became important to identify such information as soon as they are posted to make actionable decisions (e.g., debunking rumors, or taking certain measures for traveling). To address this…
The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered many facets of our lives. With nationwide lockdowns and stay-at-home advisories, conversations about the pandemic have naturally moved to social networks, e.g. Twitter. This affords an unprecedented insight into the evolution of social discourse in the presence of a long-running destabilizing factor such as a pandemic with the high-volume, high-velocity, high-noise Covid-19 Twitter feed. However, real-time information extraction from such a data stream requires a fault-tolerant streaming infrastructure to perform the non-trivial integration of he…
News creation and consumption has been changing since the advent of social media. An estimated 2.95 billion people in 2019 used social media worldwide. The widespread of the Coronavirus COVID-19 resulted with a tsunami of social media. Most platforms were used to transmit relevant news, guidelines and precautions to people. According to WHO, uncontrolled conspiracy theories and propaganda are spreading faster than the COVID-19 pandemic itself, creating an infodemic and thus causing psychological panic, misleading medical advises, and economic disruption. Accordingly, discussions have been init…
Faculty of Computing, University Malaysia Pahang（马来西亚乌拉大学 computing 学院）；Faculty of Electronic Engineering Technology, University Malaysia Perlis（马来西亚霹雳大学电子工程技术学院）
As the novel coronavirus spread globally, a growing public panic was expressed over the internet. We examine the public discussion concerning COVID-19 on Twitter. We use a dataset of 67 million tweets from 12 million users collected between January 29, 2020 and March 4, 2020. We categorize users based on their home countries, social identities, and political orientation. We find that news media, government officials, and individual news reporters posted a majority of influential tweets, while the most influential ones are still written by regular users. Tweets mentioning "fake news" URLs and d…
We describe our straight-forward approach for Tasks 5 and 6 of 2021 Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared tasks. Our system is based on fine-tuning Distill- BERT on each task, as well as first fine-tuning the model on the other task. We explore how much fine-tuning is necessary for accurately classifying tweets as containing self-reported COVID-19 symptoms (Task 5) or whether a tweet related to COVID-19 is self-reporting, non-personal reporting, or a literature/news mention of the virus (Task 6).
Fake tweets are observed to be ever-increasing, demanding immediate countermeasures to combat their spread. During COVID-19, tweets with misinformation should be flagged and neutralized in their early stages to mitigate the damages. Most of the existing methods for early detection of fake news assume to have enough propagation information for large labeled tweets -- which may not be an ideal setting for cases like COVID-19 where both aspects are largely absent. In this work, we present ENDEMIC, a novel early detection model which leverages exogenous and endogenous signals related to tweets, wh…
The omnipresent COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a parallel spreading of misinformation, also referred to as an Infodemic. Consequently, social media have become targets for the application of social bots, that is, algorithms that mimic human behaviour. Their ability to exert influence on social media can be exploited by amplifying misinformation, rumours, or conspiracy theories which might be harmful to society and the mastery of the pandemic. By applying social bot detection and content analysis techniques, this study aims to determine the extent to which social bots interfere with COVID- 19 d…
The outbreak of the COVID-19 leads to a burst of information in major online social networks (OSNs). Facing this constantly changing situation, OSNs have become an essential platform for people expressing opinions and seeking up-to-the-minute information. Thus, discussions on OSNs may become a reflection of reality. This paper aims to figure out the distinctive characteristics of the Greater Region (GR) through conducting a data-driven exploratory study of Twitter COVID-19 information in the GR and related countries using machine learning and representation learning methods. We find that tweet…
University of Saskatchewan（萨斯喀彻温大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
The COVID-19 pandemic has developed to be more than a bio-crisis as global news has reported a sharp rise in xenophobia and discrimination in both online and offline communities. Such toxic behaviors take a heavy toll on society, especially during these daunting times. Despite the gravity of the issue, very few studies have studied online antisocial behaviors amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we fill the research gap by collecting and annotating a large dataset of over 40 million COVID-19 related tweets. Specially, we propose an annotation framework to annotate the antisocial behavior…
