Health misinformation has been found to be prevalent on social media, particularly in new public health crises in which there is limited scientific information. However, social media can also play a role in limiting and refuting health misinformation. Using as a case study US President Donald Trump's controversial comments about the promise and power of UV light- and disinfectant-based treatments, this data memo examines how these comments were discussed and responded to on Twitter. We find that these comments fell into established politically partisan narratives and dominated discussion of both politics and COVID in the days following. Contestation of the comments was much more prevalent than support. Supporters attacked media coverage in line with existing Trump narratives. Contesters responded with humour and shared mainstream media coverage condemning the comments. These practices would have strengthened the original misinformation through repetition and done little to construct a successful refutation for those who might have believed them. This research adds much-needed knowledge to our understanding of the information environment surrounding COVID and demonstrates that, despite calls for the depoliticization of health information in this public health crisis, this is largely being approached as a political issue along divisive, polarised, partisan lines.
Amidst COVID-19 misinformation spreading, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter rolled out design interventions, including banners linking to authoritative resources and more specific "false information" labels. In late March 2020, shortly after these interventions began to appear, we conducted an exploratory mixed-methods survey (N = 311) to learn: what are social media users' attitudes towards these interventions, and to what extent do they self-report effectiveness? We found that most participants indicated a positive attitude towards interventions, particularly post-specific lab…
Misinformation/disinformation about COVID-19 has been rampant on social media around the world. In this study, we investigate COVID-19 misinformation/ disinformation on social media in multiple languages - Farsi (Persian), Chinese, and English, about multiple countries - Iran, China, and the United States (US), and on multiple platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Weibo, and WhatsApp. Misinformation, especially about a global pandemic, is a global problem yet it is common for studies of COVID-19 misinformation on social media to focus on a single language, like English, a single coun…
COVID-19 resulted in an infodemic, which could erode public trust, impede virus containment, and outlive the pandemic itself. The evolving and fragmented media landscape is a key driver of the spread of misinformation. Using misinformation identified by the fact-checking platform by Tencent and posts on Weibo, our results showed that the evolution of misinformation follows an issue-attention cycle, pertaining to topics such as city lockdown, cures, and preventions, and school reopening. Sources of authority weigh in on these topics, but their influence is complicated by peoples' pre-existing b…
Though significant efforts such as removing false claims and promoting reliable sources have been increased to combat COVID-19 "misinfodemic", it remains an unsolved societal challenge if lacking a proper understanding of susceptible online users, i.e., those who are likely to be attracted by, believe and spread misinformation. This study attempts to answer {\it who} constitutes the population vulnerable to the online misinformation in the pandemic, and what are the robust features and short-term behavior signals that distinguish susceptible users from others. Using a 6-month longitudinal user…
While most social media companies have attempted to address the challenge of COVID-19 misinformation, the success of those policies is difficult to assess, especially when focusing on individual platforms. This study explores the relationship between Twitter and YouTube in spreading COVID-19 vaccine-related misinformation through a mixed-methods approach to analyzing a collection of tweets in 2021 sharing YouTube videos where those Twitter accounts had also linked to deleted YouTube videos. Principal components, cluster and network analyses are used to group the videos and tweets into interpre…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus wi…
University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；University of Duisburg-Essen（杜伊斯堡-埃森大学）
The spreading COVID-19 misinformation over social media already draws the attention of many researchers. According to Google Scholar, about 26000 COVID-19 related misinformation studies have been published to date. Most of these studies focusing on 1) detect and/or 2) analysing the characteristics of COVID-19 related misinformation. However, the study of the social behaviours related to misinformation is often neglected. In this paper, we introduce a fine-grained annotated misinformation tweets dataset including social behaviours annotation (e.g. comment or question to the misinformation). The…
While false rumors pose a threat to the successful overcoming of the COVID-19 pandemic, an understanding of how rumors diffuse in online social networks is - even for non-crisis situations - still in its infancy. Here we analyze a large sample consisting of COVID-19 rumor cascades from Twitter that have been fact-checked by third-party organizations. The data comprises N=10,610 rumor cascades that have been retweeted more than 24 million times. We investigate whether COVID-19 misinformation spreads more viral than the truth and whether the differences in the diffusion of true vs. false rumors …
Twitter is becoming an increasingly important platform for disseminating information during crisis situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Effective crisis communication on Twitter can shape the public perception of the crisis, influence adherence to preventative measures, and thus affect public health. Influential accounts are particularly important as they reach large audiences quickly. This study identifies influential German-language accounts from almost 3 million German tweets collected between January and May 2020 by constructing a retweet network and calculating PageRank centrality v…
The COVID-19 pandemic has been the subject of a vast amount of misinformation, particularly in digital information environments, and major social media platforms recently publicized some of the countermeasures they are adopting. This presents an opportunity to examine the nature of the misinformation and disinformation being produced, and the theoretical and technological paradigm used to counter it. I argue that this approach is based on a conception of misinformation as epistemic pollution that can only justify a limited and potentially inadequate response , and that some of the measures und…
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Federal University of Paraná（巴拉那联邦大学）
Misinformation entails the dissemination of falsehoods that leads to the slow fracturing of society via decreased trust in democratic processes, institutions, and science. The public has grown aware of the role of social media as a superspreader of untrustworthy information, where even pandemics have not been immune. In this paper, we focus on COVID-19 misinformation and examine a subset of 2.1M tweets to understand misinformation as a function of engagement, tweet content (COVID-19- vs. non-COVID-19-related), and veracity (misleading or factual). Using correlation analysis, we show the most r…
The ongoing Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic highlights the inter-connectedness of our present-day globalized world. With social distancing policies in place, virtual communication has become an important source of (mis)information. As increasing number of people rely on social media platforms for news, identifying misinformation and uncovering the nature of online discourse around COVID-19 has emerged as a critical task. To this end, we collected streaming data related to COVID-19 using the Twitter API, starting March 1, 2020. We identified unreliable and misleading contents based on fact-chec…
The move to university life is characterized by strong emotions, some of them negative, such as loneliness, anxiety, and depression. These negative emotions are strengthened due to the obligatory lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous research indicates association among the use of social media, university satisfaction, and the aforementioned emotions. We report findings from 248 international undergraduates in The Netherlands, all students at the International School of Business. Our results indicate strong correlations between anxiety, loneliness, and COVID-19-related stress with un…
During a disease outbreak, timely non-medical interventions are critical in preventing the disease from growing into an epidemic and ultimately a pandemic. However, taking quick measures requires the capability to detect the early warning signs of the outbreak. This work collects Twitter posts surrounding the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic expressing the most common symptoms of COVID-19 including cough and fever, geolocated to the United States. Through examining the variation in Twitter activities at the state level, we observed a temporal lag between the rises in the number of symptom reporting twee…
Anti-vaccination views pervade online social media, fueling distrust in scientific expertise and increasing vaccine-hesitant individuals. While previous studies focused on specific countries, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the vaccination discourse worldwide, underpinning the need to tackle low-credible information flows on a global scale to design effective countermeasures. Here, we leverage 316 million vaccine-related Twitter messages in 18 languages, from October 2019 to March 2021, to quantify misinformation flows between users exposed to anti-vaccination (no-vax) content. We find that, dur…
False claims about COVID-19 vaccines can undermine public trust in ongoing vaccination campaigns, thus posing a threat to global public health. Misinformation originating from various sources has been spreading online since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we present a dataset of Twitter posts that exhibit a strong anti-vaccine stance. The dataset consists of two parts: a) a streaming keyword-centered data collection with more than 1.8 million tweets, and b) a historical account-level collection with more than 135 million tweets. The former leverages the Twitter streaming…
The COVID-19 pandemic has been damaging to the lives of people all around the world. Accompanied by the pandemic is an infodemic, an abundant and uncontrolled spreading of potentially harmful misinformation. The infodemic may severely change the pandemic's course by interfering with public health interventions such as wearing masks, social distancing, and vaccination. In particular, the impact of the infodemic on vaccination is critical because it holds the key to reverting to pre-pandemic normalcy. This paper presents findings from a global survey on the extent of worldwide exposure to the CO…
Center of Innovation and Development in Artif. Intell. (CIADA)（人工智能创新与发展中心（CIADA））；Umm Al-Qura University（乌姆·库拉大学）；University of Jeddah（吉达大学）
The rapid growth of social media content during the current pandemic provides useful tools for disseminating information which has also become a root for misinformation. Therefore, there is an urgent need for fact-checking and effective techniques for detecting misinformation in social media. In this work, we study the misinformation in the Arabic content of Twitter. We construct a large Arabic dataset related to COVID-19 misinformation and gold-annotate the tweets into two categories: misinformation or not. Then, we apply eight different traditional and deep machine learning models, with diff…
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of society, not only bringing health hazards, but also posing challenges to public order, governments and mental health. Moreover, it is the first one in history in which people from around the world uses social media to massively express their thoughts and concerns. This study aims at examining the stages of crisis response and recovery as a sociological problem by operationalizing a well-known model of crisis stages in terms of a psycho-linguistic analysis. Based on a large collection of Twitter data spanning from March to August 2020 in Argenti…
The outbreak of the infectious and fatal disease COVID-19 has revealed that pandemics assail public health in two waves: first, from the contagion itself and second, from plagues of suspicion and stigma. Now, we have in our hands and on our phones an outbreak of moral controversy. Modern dependency on social medias has not only facilitated access to the locations of vaccine clinics and testing sites but also-and more frequently-to the convoluted explanations of how "COVID-19 was a FIFA conspiracy"[1]. The MIT Media Lab finds that false news "diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and …
Health-related rumors spreading online during a public crisis may pose a serious threat to people's well-being. Existing crisis informatics research lacks in-depth insights into the characteristics of health rumors and the efforts to debunk them on social media in a pandemic. To fill this gap, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of four months of rumor-related online discussion during COVID-19 on Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site. Results suggest that the dread (cause fear) type of health rumors provoked significantly more discussions and lasted longer than the wish (raise hope) type. We fur…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；New York University（纽约大学）
Fact checking by professionals is viewed as a vital defense in the fight against misinformation.While fact checking is important and its impact has been significant, fact checks could have limited visibility and may not reach the intended audience, such as those deeply embedded in polarized communities. Concerned citizens (i.e., the crowd), who are users of the platforms where misinformation appears, can play a crucial role in disseminating fact-checking information and in countering the spread of misinformation. To explore if this is the case, we conduct a data-driven study of misinformation …
The World Health Organization have emphasised that misinformation - spreading rapidly through social media - poses a serious threat to the COVID-19 response. Drawing from theories of health perception and cognitive load, we develop and test a research model hypothesizing why people share unverified COVID-19 information through social media. Our findings suggest a person's trust in online information and perceived information overload are strong predictors of unverified information sharing. Furthermore, these factors, along with a person's perceived COVID-19 severity and vulnerability influence…
COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has increased concerns about vaccine uptake required to overcome the pandemic and protect public health. A critical factor associated with anti-vaccine attitudes is the information shared on social media. In this work, we investigate misinformation communities and narratives that can contribute to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. During the pandemic, anti-science and political misinformation/conspiracies have been rampant on social media. Therefore, we investigate misinformation and conspiracy groups and their characteristic behaviours in Twitter data collected on COVID-1…
This paper explores the impact of the Covid-19 crisis at the level of individual information behavior, based on an online survey among 308 participants from the German-speaking countries Austria, Germany and Switzerland in April and May 2020. The results show first that the Covid-19 crisis has led to an increased demand for reliable information. This goes alongside a significant increased use of public broadcasting, newspapers and information provided by public organizations. Second, the majority (84%) of the participants reported being satisfied with the information supply during the Covid-19…
Given the widespread dissemination of inaccurate medical advice related to the 2019 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), such as fake remedies, treatments and prevention suggestions, misinformation detection has emerged as an open problem of high importance and interest for the research community. Several works study health misinformation detection, yet little attention has been given to the perceived severity of misinformation posts. In this work, we frame health misinformation as a risk assessment task. More specifically, we study the severity of each misinformation story and how readers perceiv…
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 analyzed the perceived accuracy of COVID-19 vaccine Tweets when they were spoken back by a third-party Amazon Alexa skill. We mimicked the soft moderation that Twitter applies to COVID-19 misinformation content in both forms of warning covers and warning tags to investigate whether the third-party skill could affect how and when users heed these warnings. The results from a 304-participant study suggest that the spoken back warning covers may not work as intended, even when converted from text to speech. We controlled for COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy and political leanings …
We study how the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside the severe mobility restrictions that ensued, has impacted information access on Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia. A longitudinal analysis that combines pageview statistics for 12 Wikipedia language editions with mobility reports published by Apple and Google reveals massive shifts in the volume and nature of information seeking patterns during the pandemic. Interestingly, while we observe a transient increase in Wikipedia's pageview volume following mobility restrictions, the nature of information sought was impacted more permane…
The COVID-19 global pandemic and the lockdown policies enacted to mitigate it have had profound effects on the labour market. Understanding these effects requires us to obtain and analyse data in as close to real time as possible, especially as rules change rapidly and local lockdowns are enacted. In this work we study the UK labour market by analysing data from the online job board Reed.co.uk. Using topic modelling and geo-inference methods we are able to break down the data by sector and geography. We also study how the salary, contract type and mode of work have changed since the COVID-19 c…
The emergence of novel COVID-19 causing an overload in health system and high mortality rate. The key priority is to contain the epidemic and prevent the infection rate. In this context, many countries are now in some degree of lockdown to ensure extreme social distancing of entire population and hence slowing down the epidemic spread. Further, authorities use case quarantine strategy and manual second/third contact-tracing to contain the COVID-19 disease. However, manual contact tracing is time consuming and labor-intensive task which tremendously overload public health systems. In this paper…
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 …
Characterizing the Emotion Carriers of COVID-19 Misinformation and Their Impact on Vaccination Outcomes in India and the United States
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi（因德拉普拉斯信息技术学院德里分校）；PES University, Bangalore（佩斯大学班加罗尔分校）；BITS Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus（印度比尔拉科学技术学院果阿校区）
The challenges and realities of retailing in a COVID-19 world: Identifying trending and Vital During Crisis keywords during Covid-19 using Machine Learning (Austria as a case study)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of data visualizations were created to inform the public about the rapidly evolving crisis. Data dashboards, a form of information dissemination used during the pandemic, have facilitated this process by visualizing statistics regarding the number of COVID-19 cases over time. In this research, we conducted a qualitative interview study among dashboard creators from federal agencies, state health departments, mainstream news media outlets, and other organizations that created (often widely-used) COVID-19 dashboards to answer the following questions: how di…
Public information search data from sources such as Google Trends affords researchers a perspective on what society does not know, or what society wants to find out prompted by, or in response to, developments in societal communication and news media events. In times of crisis, online public information search thus offers a window into the most urgent concerns of, and demands by society. By extension, such data offers a window into upcoming, and currently pressing demands on businesses, policymakers and researchers. This research note aims to illustrate some of these themes with a visual-based…
University at Buffalo – The State University of New York（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；American Medical Association（美国医学会）
This study evaluated post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among frontline US physicians (treating COVID-19 patients) in comparison with second-line physicians (not treating COVID-19 patients), and identified the significance and patterns of factors associated with higher PTSD risk. A cross-sectional, web-based survey was deployed during August and September, 2020, to practicing physicians in the 18 states with the largest COVID-19 cases. Among 1,478 responding physicians, 1,017 completed the PTSD Checklist (PCL-5). First, the PCL-5 was used to compare symptom endorsement between the two physi…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）
The spread of COVID-19 has sparked racism and hate on social media targeted towards Asian communities. However, little is known about how racial hate spreads during a pandemic and the role of counterspeech in mitigating this spread. In this work, we study the evolution and spread of anti-Asian hate speech through the lens of Twitter. We create COVID-HATE, the largest dataset of anti-Asian hate and counterspeech spanning 14 months, containing over 206 million tweets, and a social network with over 127 million nodes. By creating a novel hand-labeled dataset of 3,355 tweets, we train a text class…
As the COVID-19 pandemic began to sweep across the US it elicited a wide spectrum of responses, both online and offline, across the population. To aid the development of effective spatially targeted interventions in the midst of this turmoil, it is important to understand the geolocalization of these online emotional responses, as well as their association with offline behavioral responses. Here, we analyze around 13 million geotagged tweets in 49 cities across the US from the first few months of the pandemic to assess regional dependence in online sentiments with respect to a few major topics…
Los Alamos National Lab（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted every corner of earth, disrupting governments and leading to socioeconomic instability. This crisis has prompted questions surrounding how different sectors of society interact and influence each other during times of change and stress. Given the unprecedented economic and societal impacts of this pandemic, many new data sources have become available, allowing us to quantitatively explore these associations. Understanding these relationships can help us better prepare for future disasters and mitigate the impacts. Here, we focus on…
We have witnessed an unprecedented public health crisis caused by the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has severely affected medical institutions, our common lives, and social-economic activities. This crisis also reveals the brittleness of existing medical services, such as over-centralization of medical resources, the hysteresis of medical services digitalization, and weak security and privacy protection of medical data. The integration of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and blockchain is expected to be a panacea to COVID-19 attributed to the ubiquitous presence and the percep…
Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia ever created, is a global initiative driven by volunteer contributions. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and mobility restrictions ensued across the globe, it was unclear whether Wikipedia volunteers would become less active in the face of the pandemic, or whether they would rise to meet the increased demand for high-quality information despite the added stress inflicted by this crisis. Analyzing 223 million edits contributed from 2018 to 2020 across twelve Wikipedia language editions, we find that Wikipedia's global volunteer community responded remarka…
Shiv Nadar University；Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi（德里英迪拉普拉斯塔信息技术学院）；All India Institute of Medical Sciences（全印度医学科学研究所）；GL Bajaj Institute Of Tech and Management（GL Bajaj 技术与管理学院）；Netaji Subhas University of Technology（Netaji Subhas 技术大学）
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered the potential of digital misinformation in shaping the health of nations. The deluge of unverified information that spreads faster than the epidemic itself is an unprecedented phenomenon that has put millions of lives in danger. Mitigating this Infodemic requires strong health messaging systems that are engaging, vernacular, scalable, effective and continuously learn the new patterns of misinformation. Objective: We created WashKaro, a multi-pronged intervention for mitigating misinformation through conversational AI, machine translation and natu…
