Conventional preventive measures during pandemic include social distancing and lockdown. Such measures in the time of social media brought about a new set of challenges - vulnerability to the toxic impact of online misinformation is high. A case in point is the prevailing COVID-19; as the virus propagates, so does the associated misinformation and fake news about it leading to infodemic. Since the outbreak, there has been a surge of studies investigating various aspects of the pandemic. Of interest to this chapter include studies centring on datasets from online social media platforms where the bulk of the public discourse happen. Consequently, the main goal is to support the fight against negative infodemic by (1) contributing a diverse set of curated relevant datasets (2) recommending relevant areas to study using the datasets (3) discussion on how relevant datasets, strategies and state-of-the-art IT tools can be leveraged in managing the pandemic.
Combating Misinformation in the Arab World: Challenges & Opportunities
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎赫尔分校）；Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·卡西姆大学科学与工程学院）；EURECOM Biot France（EURECOM法国生物研究中心）
Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；Weill Cornell Medicine（威尔康奈尔医学院）
Social media has been one of the main information consumption sources for the public, allowing people to seek and spread information more quickly and easily. However, the rise of various social media platforms also enables the proliferation of online misinformation. In particular, misinformation in the health domain has significant impacts on our society such as the COVID-19 infodemic. Therefore, health misinformation in social media has become an emerging research direction that attracts increasing attention from researchers of different disciplines. Compared to misinformation in other domain…
Misinformation during pandemic situations like COVID-19 is growing rapidly on social media and other platforms. This expeditious growth of misinformation creates adverse effects on the people living in the society. Researchers are trying their best to mitigate this problem using different approaches based on Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This survey aims to study different approaches of misinformation detection on COVID-19 in recent literature to help the researchers in this domain. More specifically, we review the different methods used for …
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…
Health misinformation is believed to have contributed to vaccine hesitancy during the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting concerns about the role of social media in polarization and social stability. While previous research has identified a link between political partisanship and misinformation sharing online, the interaction between partisanship and how much misinformation people see within their social networks has not been well studied. As a result, we do not know whether partisanship drives exposure to misinformation or people selectively share misinformation despite being exposed to factual c…
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on every human activity and, because of the urgency of finding the proper responses to such an unprecedented emergency, it generated a diffused societal debate. The online version of this discussion was not exempted by the presence of d/misinformation campaigns, but differently from what already witnessed in other debates, the COVID-19 -- intentional or not -- flow of false information put at severe risk the public health, reducing the effectiveness of governments' countermeasures. In the present manuscript, we study the effective impact of misinformation in …
AMIR: Automated MisInformation Rebuttal -- A COVID-19 Vaccination Datasets based Recommendation System
School of Artificial Intelligence Bennett University（贝内特大学人工智能学院）；College of Computing and Data Science Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）；Institute of Computer Science University of Tartu（塔尔图大学计算机科学研究所）
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…
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…
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.
While the COVID-19 pandemic continues its global devastation, numerous accompanying challenges emerge. One important challenge we face is to efficiently and effectively use recently gathered data and find computational tools to combat the COVID-19 infodemic, a typical information overloading problem. Novel coronavirus presents many questions without ready answers; its uncertainty and our eagerness in search of solutions offer a fertile environment for infodemic. It is thus necessary to combat the infodemic and make a concerted effort to confront COVID-19 and mitigate its negative impact in all…
We present Verifi2, a visual analytic system to support the investigation of misinformation on social media. On the one hand, social media platforms empower individuals and organizations by democratizing the sharing of information. On the other hand, even well-informed and experienced social media users are vulnerable to misinformation. To address the issue, various models and studies have emerged from multiple disciplines to detect and understand the effects of misinformation. However, there is still a lack of intuitive and accessible tools that help social media users distinguish misinformat…
The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 resulted in large volumes of data shared on different social media platforms. Analyzing and visualizing these data is doubtlessly essential to having a deep understanding of the pandemic's impacts on people's lives and their reactions to them. In this work, we conduct a large-scale spatiotemporal data analytic study to understand peoples' reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic during its early stages. In particular, we analyze a JSON-based dataset that is collected from news/messages/boards/blogs in English about COVID-19 over a period of 4 months, for a total of 5.…
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…
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 prevalence of new technologies and social media has amplified the effects of misinformation on our societies. Thus, it is necessary to create computational tools to mitigate their effects effectively. This study aims to provide a critical overview of computational approaches concerned with combating misinformation. To this aim, I offer an overview of scholarly definitions of misinformation. I adopt a framework for studying misinformation that suggests paying attention to the source, content, and consumers as the three main elements involved in the process of misinformation and I provide an…
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…
In this paper we introduce ArCOV19-Rumors, an Arabic COVID-19 Twitter dataset for misinformation detection composed of tweets containing claims from 27th January till the end of April 2020. We collected 138 verified claims, mostly from popular fact-checking websites, and identified 9.4K relevant tweets to those claims. Tweets were manually-annotated by veracity to support research on misinformation detection, which is one of the major problems faced during a pandemic. ArCOV19-Rumors supports two levels of misinformation detection over Twitter: verifying free-text claims (called claim-level ver…
Nowadays, artificial intelligence algorithms are used for targeted and personalized content distribution in the large scale as part of the intense competition for attention in the digital media environment. Unfortunately, targeted information dissemination may result in intellectual isolation and discrimination. Further, as demonstrated in recent political events in the US and EU, malicious bots and social media users can create and propagate targeted `fake news' content in different forms for political gains. From the other direction, fake news detection algorithms attempt to combat such prob…
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 …
A rapidly evolving situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic is a significant challenge for AI/ML models because of its unpredictability. %The most reliable indicator of the pandemic spreading has been the number of test positive cases. However, the tests are both incomplete (due to untested asymptomatic cases) and late (due the lag from the initial contact event, worsening symptoms, and test results). Social media can complement physical test data due to faster and higher coverage, but they present a different challenge: significant amounts of noise, misinformation and disinformation. We believ…
Parents - particularly moms - increasingly consult social media for support when taking decisions about their young children, and likely also when advising other family members such as elderly relatives. Minimizing malignant online influences is therefore crucial to securing their assent for policies ranging from vaccinations, masks and social distancing against the pandemic, to household best practices against climate change, to acceptance of future 5G towers nearby. Here we show how a strengthening of bonds across online communities during the pandemic, has led to non-Covid-19 conspiracy the…
University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
The proliferation of fake news on social media has opened up new directions of research for timely identification and containment of fake news, and mitigation of its widespread impact on public opinion. While much of the earlier research was focused on identification of fake news based on its contents or by exploiting users' engagements with the news on social media, there has been a rising interest in proactive intervention strategies to counter the spread of misinformation and its impact on society. In this survey, we describe the modern-day problem of fake news and, in particular, highlight…
COVID-19 pandemic has generated what public health officials called an infodemic of misinformation. As social distancing and stay-at-home orders came into effect, many turned to social media for socializing. This increase in social media usage has made it a prime vehicle for the spreading of misinformation. This paper presents a mechanism to detect COVID-19 health-related misinformation in social media following an interdisciplinary approach. Leveraging social psychology as a foundation and existing misinformation frameworks, we defined misinformation themes and associated keywords incorporate…
The objective of this work is to explore popular discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic and policies implemented to manage it. Using Natural Language Processing, Text Mining, and Network Analysis to analyze corpus of tweets that relate to the COVID-19 pandemic, we identify common responses to the pandemic and how these responses differ across time. Moreover, insights as to how information and misinformation were transmitted via Twitter, starting at the early stages of this pandemic, are presented. Finally, this work introduces a dataset of tweets collected from all over the world, in multiple l…
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues its march around the world, an unprecedented amount of open data is being generated for genetics and epidemiological research. The unparalleled rate at which many research groups around the world are releasing data and publications on the ongoing pandemic is allowing other scientists to learn from local experiences and data generated in the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is a need to integrate additional data sources that map and measure the role of social dynamics of such a unique world-wide event into biomedical, biological, and epidem…
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused globally significant impacts since the beginning of 2020. This brought a lot of confusion to society, especially due to the spread of misinformation through social media. Although there were already several studies related to the detection of misinformation in social media data, most studies focused on the English dataset. Research on COVID-19 misinformation detection in Indonesia is still scarce. Therefore, through this research, we collect and annotate datasets for Indonesian and build prediction models for detecting COVID-19 misinformation by considering the…
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 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…
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…
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；HBKU（卡塔尔哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
Over the past few months, there were huge numbers of circulating tweets and discussions about Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the Arab region. It is important for policy makers and many people to identify types of shared tweets to better understand public behavior, topics of interest, requests from governments, sources of tweets, etc. It is also crucial to prevent spreading of rumors and misinformation about the virus or bad cures. To this end, we present the largest manually annotated dataset of Arabic tweets related to COVID-19. We describe annotation guidelines, analyze our dataset and build effe…
TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology（莱布尼茨科学技术信息中心）；L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学L3S研究中心）
Fake news on social media has become a hot topic of research as it negatively impacts the discourse of real news in the public. Specifically, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rise of inaccurate and misleading information due to the surrounding controversies and unknown details at the beginning of the pandemic. The FakeNews task at MediaEval 2020 tackles this problem by creating a challenge to automatically detect tweets containing misinformation based on text and structure from Twitter follower network. In this paper, we present a simple approach that uses BERT embeddings and a shallow…
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…
Recently, the misinformation problem has been addressed with a crowdsourcing-based approach: to assess the truthfulness of a statement, instead of relying on a few experts, a crowd of non-expert is exploited. We study whether crowdsourcing is an effective and reliable method to assess truthfulness during a pandemic, targeting statements related to COVID-19, thus addressing (mis)information that is both related to a sensitive and personal issue and very recent as compared to when the judgment is done. In our experiments, crowd workers are asked to assess the truthfulness of statements, and to p…
The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an `infodemic' -- of accurate and inaccurate health information across social media. Detecting misinformation amidst dynamically changing information landscape is challenging; identifying relevant keywords and posts is arduous due to the large amount of human effort required to inspect the content and sources of posts. We aim to reduce the resource cost of this process by introducing a weakly-supervised iterative graph-based approach to detect keywords, topics, and themes related to misinformation, with a focus on COVID-19. Our approach can success…
Misinformation promotes distrust in science, undermines public health, and may drive civil unrest. Vaccine misinformation, in particular, has stalled efforts to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting social media platforms' attempts to reduce it. Some have questioned whether "soft" content moderation remedies -- e.g., flagging and downranking misinformation -- were successful, suggesting that the addition of "hard" content remedies -- e.g., deplatforming and content bans -- is necessary. We therefore examined whether Facebook's vaccine misinformation content removal policies were effective.…
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…
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a deep impact on the lives of the entire world population, inducing a participated societal debate. As in other contexts, the debate has been the subject of several d/misinformation campaigns; in a quite unprecedented fashion, however, the presence of false information has seriously put at risk the public health. In this sense, detecting the presence of malicious narratives and identifying the kinds of users that are more prone to spread them represent the first step to limit the persistence of the former ones. In the present paper we analyse the semantic network …
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 …
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…
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…
Bot Detection is an essential asset in a period where Online Social Networks(OSN) is a part of our lives. This task becomes more relevant in crises, as the Covid-19 pandemic, where there is an incipient risk of proliferation of social bots, producing a possible source of misinformation. In order to address this issue, it has been compared different methods to detect automatically social bots on Twitter using Data Selection. The techniques utilized to elaborate the bot detection models include the utilization of features as the tweets metadata or the Digital Fingerprint of the Twitter accounts.…
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…
