Deep Negative Effects of Misleading Information about COVID-19 on Populations Through Twitter (original) (raw)
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Social Media, Misinformation and Covid-19
2021
Social media has come as a boon, and as curse of spreading false news Fake news has always been on the horizon even earlier Only difference is that the fake news in earlier times was more risky and dangerous Because in those times, identifying the fake news was not only difficult but propagating about it was also difficult In these times, even though we have fake news the controlling measures are better and convincing people about them easy With Covid-19, the pandemic in a century, people saw the havoc fake news can play The paper defines, classifies Fake news It discusses all the measures taken by various social media to address this issue It also broadly gives an overview of the technical measures taken to address the issue © 2021 Karadeniz Technical University All rights reserved
Impact of rumors or misinformation on coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in social media
International journal of health sciences, 2022
Introduction: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory tract illness resulting from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, which has spread all over the globe, making it a major public health challenge across health systems. Simultaneously, numerous rumors, misinformation, and hoaxes appeared on several social media platforms regarding the etiology, outcomes, prevention, and cure of the disease1. The pressing issue is fake news spread more rapidly in social media than the ones from reliable sources and damages the authenticity balance of news ecosystem. Methodology: These articles contained diverse study methods (survey, content analysis, interview, literature review & others) and paradigm models (quantitative, qualitative) to identify the widespread misinformation and its impacts. Conclusion: Mainstream media platforms mostly contain fake news and rumors. The long-standing issue of misinformation regarding different socio-political i...
The COVID-19 Social Media Infodemic Reflects Uncertainty and State-Sponsored Propaganda
ArXiv, 2020
Significant attention has been devoted to determining the credibility of online misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic on social media. Here, we compare the credibility of tweets about COVID-19 to datasets pertaining to other health issues. We find that the quantity of information about COVID-19 is indeed overwhelming, but that the majority of links shared cannot be rated for its credibility. Reasons for this failure to rate include widespread use of social media and news aggregators. The majority of links that could be rated came from credible sources; however, we found a large increase in the proportion of state-sponsored propaganda among non-credible and less credible URLs, suggesting that COVID-19 may be used as a vector to spread misinformation and disinformation for political purposes. Overall, results indicate that COVID-19 is unfolding in a highly uncertain information environment that not may amenable to fact-checking as scientific understanding of the disease, and appr...
PLOS ONE, 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread attention to an “infodemic” of potential health misinformation. This claim has not been assessed based on evidence. We evaluated if health misinformation became more common during the pandemic. We gathered about 325 million posts sharing URLs from Twitter and Facebook during the beginning of the pandemic (March 8-May 1, 2020) compared to the same period in 2019. We relied on source credibility as an accepted proxy for misinformation across this database. Human annotators also coded a subsample of 3000 posts with URLs for misinformation. Posts about COVID-19 were 0.37 times as likely to link to “not credible” sources and 1.13 times more likely to link to “more credible” sources than prior to the pandemic. Posts linking to “not credible” sources were 3.67 times more likely to include misinformation compared to posts from “more credible” sources. Thus, during the earliest stages of the pandemic, when claims of an infodemic emerged, social media ...
International and Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Sciences, 2020
Since the Coronavirus health emergency was declared, many are the fake news that have circulated around this topic, including rumours, conspiracy theories and myths. According to the World Economic Forum, fake news is one of the threats in today's societies, since this type of information circulates fast and is often inaccurate and misleading. Moreover, fake-news are far more shared than evidence-based news among social media users and thus, this can potentially lead to decisions that do not consider the individual’s best interest. Drawing from this evidence, the present study aims at comparing the type of Tweets and Sina Weibo posts regarding COVID-19 that contain either false or scientific veracious information. To that end 1923 messages from each social media were retrieved, classified and compared. Results show that there is more false news published and shared on Twitter than in Sina Weibo, at the same time science-based evidence is more shared on Twitter than in Weibo but ...
An exploratory study of COVID-19 misinformation on Twitter
Online Social Networks and Media
• A very timely study on misinformation on the COVID-19 pandemic • Synthesis of social media analytics methods suitable for analysis of the infodemic • Explaining what makes COVID-19 misinformation distinct from other tweets on COVID-19 • Answering where COVID-19 misinformation originates from, and how it spreads • First recommendation for social media listeners and managers, and crisis managers
Towards Combating Pandemic-Related Misinformation in Social Media
Advances in Data Mining and Database Management
Conventional preventive measures during pandemics 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 COVID-19. As the virus propagates, so does the associated misinformation and fake news about it leading to an infodemic. Since the outbreak, there has been a surge of studies investigating various aspects of the pandemic. Of interest to this chapter are studies centering on datasets from online social media platforms where the bulk of the public discourse happens. The main goal is to support the fight against negative infodemic by (1) contributing a diverse set of curated relevant datasets; (2) offering relevant areas to study using the datasets; and (3) demonstrating how relevant datasets, strategies, and state-of-the-art IT tools can be leveraged in managing the pandemic.
2022
Misinformation and conspiracy theories can spread as quickly as the COVID-19 pathogen itself. The infodemic, which describes false or misleading information about this recent epidemic on the internet, has become a serious problem all over the world, and has been declared as an "enemy" by the World Health Organization. In this sense, in order to combat the epidemic, it becomes important to reveal the nuances of COVID-19 related infodemic available on the internet. Particularly, internet users in Turkey are increasingly utilizing social media-a platform synonymous with misinformation-to access news coverage regarding the pandemic (World Health Organization, 2020). In this quantitative study focusing on the city of Istanbul (n=399), which is at the epicenter of the outbreak in Turkey, the social media usage of individuals, their trust in these platforms, exposure to misinformation and conspiracy theories, and fact-checking behaviors were examined. Our results indicate that participants tended to believe in misinformation and conspiracy theories rather than confirming information through fact-checking platforms. Nearly half of all participants believed at least one of four widespread conspiracy theories about the virus. Moreover, when fact-checking did identify misinformation, the participants' trust in social media showed a slight decrease. Based on these findings, our study proposes a comprehensive model for pandemic-related trust, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fact-checking factors on digital platforms.
Characterizing and Comparing COVID-19 Misinformation Across Languages, Countries and Platforms
arXiv (Cornell University), 2020
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/countries: Chinese (Mandarin)/China, English/USA, and Farsi (Persian)/Iran; and on multiple platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Weibo, WeChat and TikTok. 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 country, like the USA, or a single platform, like Twitter. We utilized opportunistic sampling to compile 200 specific items of viral and yet debunked misinformation across these languages, countries and platforms emerged between January 1 and August 31. We then categorized this collection based both on the topics of the misinformation and the underlying roots of that misinformation. Our multi-cultural and multilinguistic team observed that the nature of COVID-19 misinformation on social media varied in substantial ways across different languages/countries depending on the cultures, beliefs/religions, popularity of social media, types of platforms, freedom of speech and the power of people versus governments. We observe that politics is at the root of most of the collected misinformation across all three languages in this dataset. We further observe the different impact of government restrictions on platforms and platform restrictions on content in China, Iran, and the USA and their impact on a key question of our age: how do we control misinformation without silencing the voices we need to hold governments accountable?
Linguistic drivers of misinformation diffusion on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic
Italian Journal of Marketing, 2021
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, unprecedent amounts of fake news and hoax spread on social media. In particular, conspiracy theories argued on the effect of specific new technologies like 5G and misinformation tarnished the reputation of brands like Huawei. Language plays a crucial role in understanding the motivational determinants of social media users in sharing misinformation, as people extract meaning from information based on their discursive resources and their skillset. In this paper, we analyze textual and non-textual cues from a panel of 4923 tweets containing the hashtags #5G and #Huawei during the first week of May 2020, when several countries were still adopting lockdown measures, to determine whether or not a tweet is retweeted and, if so, how much it is retweeted. Overall, through traditional logistic regression and machine learning, we found different effects of the textual and non-textual cues on the retweeting of a tweet and on its ability to accumulate retwe...