"COVID-19 was a FIFA conspiracy #curropt": An Investigation into the Viral Spread of COVID-19 Misinformation

06/12/2022
by   Alexander Wang, et al.
0

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 more broadly than truth, in all categories of information, and by an order of magnitude"[2]. The question is, how does the spread of misinformation interact with a physical epidemic disease? In this paper, we estimate the extent to which misinformation has influenced the course of the COVID-19 pandemic using natural language processing models and provide a strategy to combat social media posts that are likely to cause widespread harm.

READ FULL TEXT
research
07/23/2020

Health, Psychosocial, and Social issues emanating from COVID-19 pandemic based on Social Media Comments using Natural Language Processing

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global health crisis that affects man...
research
04/09/2020

CovidSens: A Vision on Reliable Social Sensing based Risk Alerting Systems for COVID-19 Spread

With the spiraling pandemic of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), ...
research
07/26/2020

How Epidemic Psychology Works on Social Media: Evolution of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

Disruptions resulting from an epidemic might often appear to amount to c...
research
11/16/2020

A Survey of Requirements for COVID-19 Mitigation Strategies. Part I: Newspaper Clips

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced virtually all aspects of our lives....
research
03/22/2021

Triage and diagnosis of COVID-19 from medical social media

Objective: This study aims to develop an end-to-end natural language pro...
research
04/13/2020

Low-Cost and High-Throughput Testing of COVID-19 Viruses and Antibodies via Compressed Sensing: System Concepts and Computational Experiments

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an ongoing pandemic infectious di...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset