Detecting Chinese Fake News on Twitter during the COVID-19 Pandemic

04/07/2023

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by   Yongjun Zhang, et al.

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The outbreak of COVID-19 has led to a global surge of Sinophobia partly because of the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news on China. In this paper, we report on the creation of a novel classifier that detects whether Chinese-language social media posts from Twitter are related to fake news about China. The classifier achieves an F1 score of 0.64 and an accuracy rate of 93 with 18,425 tweets for researchers to study fake news in the Chinese language during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also introduce a new dataset generated by our classifier that tracks the dynamics of fake news in the Chinese language during the early pandemic.