"COVID-19 was a FIFA conspiracy #curropt": An Investigation into the Viral Spread of COVID-19 Misinformation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how COVID-19 misinformation, particularly conspiracy theories like FIFA involvement, spreads on social media and influences public perception and behavior during the pandemic.

Contribution

It introduces NLP-based methods to quantify misinformation spread and proposes strategies to mitigate harmful social media content related to COVID-19.

Findings

False news spreads faster and broader than truthful information.

Misinformation significantly impacts public health responses.

Proposed strategies can reduce the spread of harmful misinformation.

Abstract

The outbreak of the infectious and fatal disease COVID-19 has revealed that pandemics assail public health in two waves: first, from the contagion itself and second, from plagues of suspicion and stigma. Now, we have in our hands and on our phones an outbreak of moral controversy. Modern dependency on social medias has not only facilitated access to the locations of vaccine clinics and testing sites but also-and more frequently-to the convoluted explanations of how "COVID-19 was a FIFA conspiracy"[1]. The MIT Media Lab finds that false news "diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truth, in all categories of information, and by an order of magnitude"[2]. The question is, how does the spread of misinformation interact with a physical epidemic disease? In this paper, we estimate the extent to which misinformation has influenced the course of the COVID-19 pandemic using natural language processing models and provide a strategy to combat social media posts that are likely to cause widespread harm.