The False COVID-19 Narratives That Keep Being Debunked: A Spatiotemporal Analysis

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spread and persistence of false COVID-19 narratives across countries and platforms, highlighting repeated debunking efforts and proposing a multilingual debunk search tool to optimize fact-checker resources.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive spatiotemporal analysis of COVID-19 misinformation debunks and introduces a multilingual search tool to improve fact-checking efficiency.

Findings

False narratives spread across countries and platforms over months.

Medical advice misinformation has the highest recurring debunking rate.

Repeated debunking leads to resource wastage, suggesting need for better tools.

Abstract

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global infodemic that has brought unprecedented challenges for citizens, media, and fact-checkers worldwide. To address this challenge, over a hundred fact-checking initiatives worldwide have been monitoring the information space in their countries and publishing regular debunks of viral false COVID-19 narratives. This study examines the database of the CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, which contains 10,381 debunks related to COVID-19 published in multiple languages by different fact-checking organisations. Our spatiotemporal analysis reveals that similar or nearly duplicate false COVID-19 narratives have been spreading in multiple modalities and on various social media platforms in different countries, sometimes as much as several months after the first debunk of that narrative has been published by an International Fact-checking Network (IFCN) fact-checker. We also find that misinformation involving general medical advice has spread across multiple countries and hence has the highest proportion of false COVID-19 narratives that keep being debunked. Furthermore, as manual fact-checking is an onerous task in itself, therefore the need to repeatedly debunk the same narrative in different countries is leading, over time, to a significant waste of fact-checker resources. To this end, we propose the idea of including a multilingual debunk search tool in the fact-checking pipeline, in addition to recommending strongly that social media platforms need to adopt the same technology at scale, so as to make the best use of scarce fact-checker resources.