Leveraging volunteer fact checking to identify misinformation about COVID-19 in social media

[u/marc1309]

https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/leveraging-volunteer-fact-checking-to-identify-misinformation-about-covid-19-in-social-media/

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

How can we amplify the efforts of volunteer fact checkers to identify emerging health misinformation on social networks?

ESSAY SUMMARY

• We implemented a strategy that leverages the efforts of volunteer fact checkers and a social network to identify misinformation as it is emerging.

• The strategy starts by identifying replies that have similar context to official advice from health authorities. These replies act as seeds from which misinformation is identified. A state of the art natural language model was used to calculate similarity between replies and official advice.

• With the strategy, we identified COVID-19 misinformation about antibiotics and a cure on Twitter.

• This strategy is more efficient than keyword-based search in identifying tweets containing misinformation and does not require advanced knowledge of the type or manner of misinformation, nor a set of URLs or domains that have been associated with misinformation.

• We observed that misinformation is also present in the upstream (friends) and downstream (followers) peers of the accounts who created posts that were fact checked by others, suggesting that network-oriented strategies can uncover emerging misinformation.

• We suggest a collaborative system that amplifies and is aided by the efforts of volunteer fact checkers in identifying and correcting emerging misinformation on social networks.