Towards Combating Pandemic-related Misinformation in Social Media

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenge of COVID-19 misinformation on social media, proposing curated datasets and strategies to combat infodemic and support pandemic management efforts.

Contribution

It introduces curated datasets and recommends research directions and IT tools to address pandemic-related misinformation on social media.

Findings

Curated datasets for COVID-19 misinformation analysis

Identification of key research areas using these datasets

Discussion on leveraging IT tools for infodemic management

Abstract

Conventional preventive measures during pandemic include social distancing and lockdown. Such measures in the time of social media brought about a new set of challenges - vulnerability to the toxic impact of online misinformation is high. A case in point is the prevailing COVID-19; as the virus propagates, so does the associated misinformation and fake news about it leading to infodemic. Since the outbreak, there has been a surge of studies investigating various aspects of the pandemic. Of interest to this chapter include studies centring on datasets from online social media platforms where the bulk of the public discourse happen. Consequently, the main goal is to support the fight against negative infodemic by (1) contributing a diverse set of curated relevant datasets (2) recommending relevant areas to study using the datasets (3) discussion on how relevant datasets, strategies and state-of-the-art IT tools can be leveraged in managing the pandemic.