scholarly journals Fact-Checking the Crisis: COVID-19, Infodemics, and the Platformization of Truth

2022 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 205630512110690
Author(s):  
Kelley Cotter ◽  
Julia R. DeCook ◽  
Shaheen Kanthawala

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, various officials flagged the critical threat of false information. In this study, we explore how three major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) responded to this “infodemic” during early stages of the pandemic via emergent fact-checking policies and practices, and consider what this means for ensuring a well-informed public. We accomplish this through a thematic analysis of documents published by the three platforms that address fact-checking, particularly those that focus on COVID-19. In addition to examining what the platforms said they did, we also examined what the platforms actually did in practice via a retrospective case study drawing on secondary data about the viral conspiracy video, Plandemic. We demonstrate that the platforms focused their energies primarily on the visibility of COVID-19 mis/disinformation on their sites via (often vaguely described) policies and practices rife with subjectivity. Moreover, the platforms communicated the expectation that users should ultimately be the ones to hash out what they believe is true. We argue that this approach does not necessarily serve the goal of ensuring a well-informed public, as has been the goal of fact-checking historically, and does little to address the underlying conditions and structures that permit the circulation and amplification of false information online.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evi Aryati Arbay ◽  
Julian Aldrin Pasha ◽  
Ari Santoso Widodo

The effect from COVID-19 pandemic has changed how presidential candidates do their political campaigns. The restriction to do social distancing makes the usual campaign not doable. That’s why presidential candidates need to find another way for their political campaign, which is by doing things digitally. This digitally driven changes can have its advantages and disadvantages. In this paper we discuss about the consequences of the changes in political campaigns in digital form or through social media for democratic societies in US presidential election. We use qualitative descriptive with case study method. In this paper we use secondary data such as research journals that’s related to this topic, documentation and articles. We find that the changes to digital campaigning have its own pros and cons that can affect how politicians do their campaigns on their social media platforms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Evi Aryati Arbay ◽  
◽  
Julian Aldrin Pasha ◽  
Ari Santoso Widodo

The effect from COVID-19 pandemic has changed how presidential candidates do their political campaigns. The restriction to do social distancing makes the usual campaign not doable. That’s why presidential candidates need to find another way for their political campaign, which is by doing things digitally. This digitally driven changes can have its advantages and disadvantages. In this paper we discuss about the consequences of the changes in political campaigns in digital form or through social media for democratic societies in US presidential election. We use qualitative descriptive with case study method. In this paper we use secondary data such as research journals that’s related to this topic, documentation and articles. We find that the changes to digital campaigning have its own pros and cons that can affect how politicians do their campaigns on their social media platforms.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Zeng ◽  
Jean Burgess ◽  
Axel Bruns

This article investigates how citizens contribute to rumour verification on social media in China, drawing on a case study of Weibo communication about the 2015 Tianjin blasts. Three aspects of citizen engagement in verifying rumours via Weibo are examined: (1) how they directly debunked rumours related to the blasts, (2) how they verified official rumour messages and (3) how they used Weibo’s community verification function to collectively identify and fact-check rumours. The article argues that in carrying out such activities, ordinary Weibo users were engaging in practices of citizen journalism. Findings from our analysis suggest that even though citizen journalists’ direct engagement in publishing debunking messages was not as visible as that of the police and mainstream media, self-organised grassroots rumour-debunking practices demonstrate great potential. In terms of both the reposts and the positive comments they received, rumour-debunking posts from non-official actors appear to have been given more credibility than those from their official counterparts. In contrast, the official narratives about the Tianjin blasts were challenged, and the credibility of the official rumour-debunking messages was commonly questioned. Nevertheless, this article also shows that Weibo’s community verification system had limited effects in facilitating how Weibo users could collaboratively fact-check potentially false information.


Jurnal Common ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-55
Author(s):  
Naurah Thifalia ◽  
Santi Susanti

Indonesian Film Censorship Institution (Lembaga Sensor Film/LSF) uses the existence of social media to increase public knowledge about the LSF's role in the world of Indonesian cinema. As a government agency, LSF uses social media to share, increase public participation, collaboration, and assume the risk of fake news. Through social media, LSF intends to build an image, and educate the public to protect against the negative effects of film and promote the Indonesian film industry. This research reveals the content production on social media platforms used by the Film Censorship Institution (LSF) to convey information to the public. This study uses a qualitative method with a case study approach. Interviews, observation used to collect data, while literature review, and documents relevant to the research used as secondary data. Data analyzed using interactive data analysis techniques from Miles & Huberman. The results showed LSF uses Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to convey visual and audiovisual information to the public. The visual content produces in four stages, ideas, visualization, revision, and final artwork (publication). The audiovisual content organizes in three stages, pre-production, production, and post-production. Changes in social media content increased LSF's Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook followers in six months. Keywords: content, social media, visual, audiovisual, film industry.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1131-1135
Author(s):  
Tomas Hambili Paulo Sanjuluca ◽  
◽  
Ricardo Correia ◽  
Anabela Antunes de Almeida ◽  
Ana Gloria Diaz Martinez ◽  
...  

Introduction: In order to have a good assessment of the quality of maternal and child health care, it is essential that there is up-to-date and reliable information. Objective: To evaluate the impact of the implementation of a computerized database of clinical processes in the admission, archive and medical statistics section, of Maternity hospital Irene Neto/Lubango-Angola. Methodology: A descriptive study with a quantitative and qualitative approach to carry out a retrospective case study deliveries and newborns, records from 2014 to 2017. Final considerations: The implementation of this project may contribute to the improvement of clinical management support management of the hospital as well as facilitating access to information for research and scientific production.


2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Doina Vesa ◽  
Cristian Martu ◽  
Razvan Leata ◽  
Ludmila Lozneanu ◽  
luminita Radulescu ◽  
...  

Paranasal mucoceles are a type of cysts that evolve slowly and are asymptomatic; this poses a difficulty in diagnosing the patient because the symptoms can go unnoticed. The mucocele evolves unpredictably. On the one hand, it can become infected turning into pyoceles and on the other hand, it can invade important regions such as the orbital, cranial or genian regions, creating facial asymmetry. This is a retrospective case study of 37 patients diagnosed with sinus mucoceles, followed up by clinical examination and paraclinical tests such as CT and MRI scans. The biochemical components of the liquid from within the mucocele were analyzed and the following criteria were recorded: NaCl-, Cl-, Na+ and cholesterine as well as cellular components such as mastocytes, macrophages, hematocytes and leucocytes. In all cases, the treatment option was surgery with favorable post-operative and follow-up evaluation. The mucoceles that appeared post-operatively (maxillary and ethmoid sinuses) evolved more rapidly than the mucoceles that were induced byan external injury. Longer follow-up of operated patients permitted a more timely diagnosis of recurrences.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 694-694
Author(s):  
Tammy Mermelstein

Abstract Preparing for or experiencing a disaster is never easy, but how leaders communicate with older adults can ease a situation or make it exponentially worse. This case study describes two disasters in the same city: Hurricane Harvey and the 2018 Houston Texas Ice Storm and the variation in messaging provided to and regarding older adults. For example, during Hurricane Harvey, the primary pre-disaster message was self-preparedness. During the storm, messages were also about individual survival. Statements such as “do not [climb into your attic] unless you have an ax or means to break through,” generated additional fear for older adults and loved ones. Yet, when an ice storm paralyzed Houston a few months later, public messaging had a strong “check on your elderly neighbors” component. This talk will explore how messaging for these events impacted older adults through traditional and social media analysis, and describe how social media platforms assisted people with rescue and recovery. Part of a symposium sponsored by Disasters and Older Adults Interest Group.


Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 556
Author(s):  
Thaer Thaher ◽  
Mahmoud Saheb ◽  
Hamza Turabieh ◽  
Hamouda Chantar

Fake or false information on social media platforms is a significant challenge that leads to deliberately misleading users due to the inclusion of rumors, propaganda, or deceptive information about a person, organization, or service. Twitter is one of the most widely used social media platforms, especially in the Arab region, where the number of users is steadily increasing, accompanied by an increase in the rate of fake news. This drew the attention of researchers to provide a safe online environment free of misleading information. This paper aims to propose a smart classification model for the early detection of fake news in Arabic tweets utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, Machine Learning (ML) models, and Harris Hawks Optimizer (HHO) as a wrapper-based feature selection approach. Arabic Twitter corpus composed of 1862 previously annotated tweets was utilized by this research to assess the efficiency of the proposed model. The Bag of Words (BoW) model is utilized using different term-weighting schemes for feature extraction. Eight well-known learning algorithms are investigated with varying combinations of features, including user-profile, content-based, and words-features. Reported results showed that the Logistic Regression (LR) with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) model scores the best rank. Moreover, feature selection based on the binary HHO algorithm plays a vital role in reducing dimensionality, thereby enhancing the learning model’s performance for fake news detection. Interestingly, the proposed BHHO-LR model can yield a better enhancement of 5% compared with previous works on the same dataset.


2019 ◽  
Vol 116 ◽  
pp. 00006
Author(s):  
Elmar Bartlmae ◽  
Luis Arboledas-Lérida ◽  
Natalie Höppner

Social Media platforms are increasingly receiving attention from scholars, as they are presumed to be both useful tools for undertaking professional assignments and a medium for engaging with large audiences and communities, within and outside academia. Additionally, these novel practices online need proper assessment and evaluation procedures. This paper aims to address the possibilities and challenges for niche research and development (R&D) projects in communicating their research via social media. The authors applied a seven-step social media strategy to an ongoing energy efficiency case study and discuss an online tool for monitoring the respective impact on social media.


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