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Register a new userThe False COVID-19 Narratives That Keep Being Debunked: A Spatiotemporal Analysis
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Added by
Iknoor Singh
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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The onset of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic instigated a global infodemic that has brought unprecedented challenges for society as a whole. During this time, a number of manual fact-checking initiatives have emerged to alleviate the spread of dis/mis-information. This study is about COVID-19 debunks published in multiple languages by different fact-checking organisations, sometimes as far as several months apart, despite the fact that the claim has already been fact-checked before. The spatiotemporal analysis reveals that similar or nearly duplicate false COVID-19 narratives have been spreading in multifarious modalities on various social media platforms in different countries. We also find that misinformation involving general medical advice has spread across multiple countries and hence has the highest proportion of false COVID-19 narratives that keep being debunked. Furthermore, as manual fact-checking is an onerous task in itself, therefore debunking similar claims recurrently is leading to a waste of resources. To this end, we propound the idea of the inclusion of multilingual debunk search in the fact-checking pipeline.
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The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has been testing every society and exposing the critical role of local politics in crisis response. In the United States, there has been a strong partisan divide which resulted in polarization of individual behaviors and divergent policy adoption across regions. Here, to better understand such divide, we characterize and compare the pandemic narratives of the Democratic and Republican politicians on social media using novel computational methods including computational framing analysis and semantic role analysis. By analyzing tweets from the politicians in the U.S., including the president, members of Congress, and state governors, we systematically uncover the contrasting narratives in terms of topics, frames, and agents that shape their narratives. We found that the Democrats narrative tends to be more concerned with the pandemic as well as financial and social support, while the Republicans discuss more about other political entities such as China. By using contrasting framing and semantic roles, the Democrats emphasize the governments role in responding to the pandemic, and the Republicans emphasize the roles of individuals and support for small businesses. Both parties narratives also include shout-outs to their followers and blaming of the other party. Our findings concretely expose the gaps in the elusive consensus between the two parties. Our methodologies may be applied to computationally study narratives in various domains.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the demand for goods and services worldwide. The combination of a public health emergency, economic distress, and misinformation-driven panic have pushed customers and vendors towards the shadow economy. In particular, dark web marketplaces (DWMs), commercial websites accessible via free software, have gained significant popularity. Here, we analyse 851,199 listings extracted from 30 DWMs between January 1, 2020 and November 16, 2020. We identify 788 listings directly related to COVID-19 products and monitor the temporal evolution of product categories including Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), medicines (e.g., hydroxyclorochine), and medical frauds. Finally, we compare trends in their temporal evolution with variations in public attention, as measured by Twitter posts and Wikipedia page visits. We reveal how the online shadow economy has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight the importance of a continuous monitoring of DWMs, especially now that real vaccines are available and in short supply. We anticipate our analysis will be of interest both to researchers and public agencies focused on the protection of public health.
An infodemic is an emerging phenomenon caused by an overabundance of information online. This proliferation of information makes it difficult for the public to distinguish trustworthy news and credible information from untrustworthy sites and non-credible sources. The perils of an infodemic debuted with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and bots (i.e., automated accounts controlled by a set of algorithms) that are suspected of spreading the infodemic. Although previous research has revealed that bots played a central role in spreading misinformation during major political events, how bots behaved during the infodemic is unclear. In this paper, we examined the roles of bots in the case of the COVID-19 infodemic and the diffusion of non-credible information such as 5G and Bill Gates conspiracy theories and content related to Trump and WHO by analyzing retweet networks and retweeted items. We show the segregated topology of their retweet networks, which indicates that right-wing self-media accounts and conspiracy theorists may lead to this opinion cleavage, while malicious bots might favor amplification of the diffusion of non-credible information. Although the basic influence of information diffusion could be larger in human users than bots, the effects of bots are non-negligible under an infodemic situation.
We investigate predictors of anti-Asian hate among Twitter users throughout COVID-19. With the rise of xenophobia and polarization that has accompanied widespread social media usage in many nations, online hate has become a major social issue, attracting many researchers. Here, we apply natural language processing techniques to characterize social media users who began to post anti-Asian hate messages during COVID-19. We compare two user groups -- those who posted anti-Asian slurs and those who did not -- with respect to a rich set of features measured with data prior to COVID-19 and show that it is possible to predict who later publicly posted anti-Asian slurs. Our analysis of predictive features underlines the potential impact of news media and information sources that report on online hate and calls for further investigation into the role of polarized communication networks and news media.
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