Machine Learning-based Automatic Annotation and Detection of COVID-19 Fake News

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated machine learning approach to detect COVID-19 misinformation on Twitter, incorporating textual, user, and bot activity features to improve accuracy and analyze bot behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable data labeling method using verified fact-checks and combines multiple feature types for enhanced misinformation detection.

Findings

Achieved 82% precision and 96% recall in classification

Bots contributed to approximately 10% of misinformation tweets

Behavior of bots varies over time during misinformation campaigns

Abstract

COVID-19 impacted every part of the world, although the misinformation about the outbreak traveled faster than the virus. Misinformation spread through online social networks (OSN) often misled people from following correct medical practices. In particular, OSN bots have been a primary source of disseminating false information and initiating cyber propaganda. Existing work neglects the presence of bots that act as a catalyst in the spread and focuses on fake news detection in 'articles shared in posts' rather than the post (textual) content. Most work on misinformation detection uses manually labeled datasets that are hard to scale for building their predictive models. In this research, we overcome this challenge of data scarcity by proposing an automated approach for labeling data using verified fact-checked statements on a Twitter dataset. In addition, we combine textual features with user-level features (such as followers count and friends count) and tweet-level features (such as number of mentions, hashtags and urls in a tweet) to act as additional indicators to detect misinformation. Moreover, we analyzed the presence of bots in tweets and show that bots change their behavior over time and are most active during the misinformation campaign. We collected 10.22 Million COVID-19 related tweets and used our annotation model to build an extensive and original ground truth dataset for classification purposes. We utilize various machine learning models to accurately detect misinformation and our best classification model achieves precision (82%), recall (96%), and false positive rate (3.58%). Also, our bot analysis indicates that bots generated approximately 10% of misinformation tweets. Our methodology results in substantial exposure of false information, thus improving the trustworthiness of information disseminated through social media platforms.