A dashboard for mitigating the COVID-19 misinfodemic

Abstract

This paper describes the current milestones achieved in our ongoing project that aims to understand the surveillance of, impact of, and effective interventions against the COVID-19 misinfodemic on Twitter. Specifically, it introduces a public dashboard which, in addition to displaying case counts in an interactive map and a navigational panel, also provides some unique features not found in other places. Particularly, the dashboard uses a curated catalog of COVID-19 related facts and debunks of misinformation, and it displays the most prevalent information from the catalog among Twitter users in user-selected U.S. geographic regions. The paper explains how to use BERT-based models to match tweets with the facts and misinformation and to detect their stance towards such information. The paper also discusses the results of preliminary experiments on analyzing the spatiotemporal spread of misinformation.