Published April 10, 2023 | Version v2
Conference proceeding Open

A Large-Scale Comparative Study of Accurate COVID-19 Information versus Misinformation

Description

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an infodemic with a massive influx of COVID-19 related content spreading rapidly across social media. This surge in information made it difficult for people to distinguish between true and false information about the virus. This challenge prompted the team of researchers to conduct a comparative analysis of the characteristics of COVID-19 misinformation versus accurate information, using a large-scale computational examination of over 242 million tweets. This study compares these two types of content across four main dimensions: 1) topic distribution, 2) tweet lifespan, 3) language characteristics, and 4) spreading dynamics over time. Additionally, a COVID-19 misinformation classification dataset was developed, which contributes to enhancing the accuracy of misinformation detection.

Files

A Large-Scale Comparative Study of Accurate COVID-19 Information versus Misinformation.pdf

Additional details

Identifiers

Funding

European Commission
VIGILANT – Vital IntelliGence to Investigate ILlegAl DisiNformaTion 101073921