Critical Impact of Social Networks Infodemic on Defeating Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: Twitter-Based Study and Research Directions

Abstract

News creation and consumption has been changing since the advent of social media. An estimated 2.95 billion people in 2019 used social media worldwide. The widespread of the Coronavirus COVID-19 resulted with a tsunami of social media. Most platforms were used to transmit relevant news, guidelines and precautions to people. According WHO, uncontrolled conspiracy theories and propaganda are spreading faster than the COVID-19 pandemic itself, creating an infodemic and thus causing psychological panic, misleading medical advises, and economic disruption. Accordingly, discussions have been initiated with the objective of moderating all COVID-19's communications, except those initiated from trusted sources such as the WHO and authorized governmental entities. This paper presents a large-scale study based on data mined from Twitter. Extensive analysis has been performed on approximately 1 million COVID-19 related tweets collected over a period of two months. Furthermore, the profiles of 288, 000 users were analyzed including unique users' profiles, meta-data and tweets' context. The study noted various interesting conclusions including the critical impact of the (1) exploitation of the COVID-19 crisis to redirect readers to irrelevant topics and (2) widespread of unauthentic medical precautions and information. Further data analysis revealed the importance of using social networks in a global pandemic crisis by relying on credible users with variety of occupations, content developers and influencers in specific fields. In this context, several insights and findings have been provided while elaborating computing and non-computing implications and research directions for potential solutions and social networks management strategies during crisis periods.

Eating Garlic Prevents COVID-19 Infection: Detecting Misinformation on the Arabic Content of Twitter

“…Twitter also provides access to a large amount of content in many languages. Along this line, many studies of misinformation on Twitter focused on analyzing the content of tweets to understand Twitter conversion during COVID 19 [26,27,28]. To study the development of conversation around misinformation on Twitter, Singh et al [26], collected five common misinformation related to COVID-19, which are about the virus's origin, vaccine development, flu comparison, heat kills the disease, and home remedies.…”

“…Another study on how misinformation content spreads over five months on Twitter was presented in [31]. On a different note, the work in [27] presents a different measure of the tweets' credibility based on user specialty and occupation.…”

Risk communications in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic: The Maldives’ experience

“…Trust is one of the most critical parameters that generate public's acceptance of the risk communication messages (Balog-Way & McComas, 2020;Jacobsen & Vraga, 2020). The featuring of policy makers and institutions outside of the health in messaging and press can be said to have provided the public with confidence on the preparedness of the public institutions and provide them with a sense of a united national response (Finset et al, 2020;La et al, 2020;Mourad et al, 2020;Zhao et al, 2020). Other studies in the country reported that public rating of the national pandemic response was high with a score of 7 out of 10 (Moosa et al, 2020a).…”

Model Generalization on COVID-19 Fake News Detection

“…The early published fact sheet about the COVID-19 misinformation suggested 59% of the sampled pandemic-related Twitter posts are evaluated as fake-news [2]. To address this, a huge amount of tweets is collected to disseminate the misinformation [21,23,27,1]. Understanding the problematic consequences of the fake-news, the online platform providers have started flag COVID-19 related information with an "alert" so the audience could be aware of the content.…”