Detecting Covid-19 misinformation on social media

Abstract

There have been many studies conducted over the last few years that have attempted to uncover the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the largest areas of concern with COVID-19 is misinformation, as it is a novel virus that many report on, even if unqualified to do so. This study aims to predict whether a Tweet can be classified as misinformation, and then analyze the differences between Tweets that are labeled as either misinformation or not by this model in the three countries (The United States, UK, and India). Machine learning models were created and validated using the CovidMis20 dataset as a training set. The result show that for the United States, there is strong evidence that the model worked at predicting fake news. Hydroxychloroquine showed up in both top hashtags and topic modeling for fake news. In the UK, the real news dataset tended to be more general and objective about COVID-19 than predicted fake news. For India, there was not much evidence that the model was effective for this country.