Fake News and Social Media about SARS-CoV-2: Insights from Peru (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aldo Alvarez-Risco ◽  
Christian R. Mejia ◽  
Jaime Delgado-Zegarra ◽  
Shyla Del-Aguila-Arcentales ◽  
Arturo A. Arce-Esquivel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Health Literacy ◽  
Digital Health ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Health Authorities ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Control And Management ◽  
Inadequate Health Literacy ◽  
Selection Of

UNSTRUCTURED Fake news has become a common practice in recent years, which is facilitated by the overwhelming use of social media by the general public. This viewpoint paper aims to analyze a selection of fake news disseminated in Peru about SARS-CoV-2 and we propose specific strategies to deal with it. In the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the need for providing official and timely information is key in the control and management of the COVID-19 disease. However, health authorities are struggling not only with providing proper patients’ care, but also dealing with appropriate risk communication given the massive spread of misinformation and fake news. Inadequate health literacy and lack of digital health literacy skills might worsen the problem. There is an urgent need to build capacity in schools and promote trusted sources in Peru and to educate on digital health literacy to combat misinformation from social media venues.

Exploring fake news identification using word and sentence embeddings

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
V.T Priyanga ◽  
J.P Sanjanasri ◽  
Vijay Krishna Menon ◽  
E.A Gopalakrishnan ◽  
K.P Soman
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Supervised Machine Learning ◽  
Breeding Ground ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Highly Correlated ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
The Liar

The widespread use of social media like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc. has changed the way News is created and published; accessing news has become easy and inexpensive. However, the scale of usage and inability to moderate the content has made social media, a breeding ground for the circulation of fake news. Fake news is deliberately created either to increase the readership or disrupt the order in the society for political and commercial benefits. It is of paramount importance to identify and filter out fake news especially in democratic societies. Most existing methods for detecting fake news involve traditional supervised machine learning which has been quite ineffective. In this paper, we are analyzing word embedding features that can tell apart fake news from true news. We use the LIAR and ISOT data set. We churn out highly correlated news data from the entire data set by using cosine similarity and other such metrices, in order to distinguish their domains based on central topics. We then employ auto-encoders to detect and differentiate between true and fake news while also exploring their separability through network analysis.

scholarly journals COVID-19 Misinformation Online and Health Literacy: A Brief Overview

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (15) ◽  
pp. 8091
Author(s):  
Salman Bin Naeem ◽  
Maged N. Kamel Boulos
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Health Literacy ◽  
Information Content ◽  
Digital Health ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
The World ◽  
Synergistic Approach ◽  
Viral Nature

Low digital health literacy affects large percentages of populations around the world and is a direct contributor to the spread of COVID-19-related online misinformation (together with bots). The ease and ‘viral’ nature of social media sharing further complicate the situation. This paper provides a quick overview of the magnitude of the problem of COVID-19 misinformation on social media, its devastating effects, and its intricate relation to digital health literacy. The main strategies, methods and services that can be used to detect and prevent the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, including machine learning-based approaches, health literacy guidelines, checklists, mythbusters and fact-checkers, are then briefly reviewed. Given the complexity of the COVID-19 infodemic, it is very unlikely that any of these approaches or tools will be fully effective alone in stopping the spread of COVID-19 misinformation. Instead, a mixed, synergistic approach, combining the best of these strategies, methods, and services together, is highly recommended in tackling online health misinformation, and mitigating its negative effects in COVID-19 and future pandemics. Furthermore, techniques and tools should ideally focus on evaluating both the message (information content) and the messenger (information author/source) and not just rely on assessing the latter as a quick and easy proxy for the trustworthiness and truthfulness of the former. Surveying and improving population digital health literacy levels are also essential for future infodemic preparedness.

scholarly journals All that Glitters Is not Gold: Consumer Health Informatics and Education in the Era of Social Media and Health Apps

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (01) ◽  
pp. 188-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Staccini ◽  
L. Fernandez-Luque ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Health Literacy ◽  
Health Care Professionals ◽  
Health Informatics ◽  
Health Management ◽  
Digital Health ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Consumer Health Informatics ◽  
Consumer Health ◽  
Chronic Patients

Summary Objective: To summarize the state of the art published during the year 2015 in the areas related to consumer health informatics and education with a special emphasis on unintended consequences of applying mobile and social media technologies in that domain. Methods: We conducted a systematic review of articles published in PubMed with a predefined set of queries, which lead to the selection of over 700 potential relevant articles. Section editors screened those papers on the title, abstract, and finally complete paper basis, taking into account the papers’ relevance for the section topic. The 15 most representative papers were finally selected by consensus between the two section editors and submitted for full review and scoring to external reviewers and the yearbook editors. Based on the final scoring, section editors selected the best five papers. Results: The five best papers can be grouped in two major areas: 1) Digital health literacy and 2) Quality and safety concerns. Regarding health literacy issues of patients with chronic conditions such as asthma, online interventions should rather focus on changing patient beliefs about the disease than on supporting them in the management of their pathology since personally controlled health management systems do not show expected benefits,. Nevertheless, encouraging and training chronic patients for an active online health information–seeking behaviour substantially decreases state anxiety level. Regarding safety and privacy issues, even recommended health-related apps available on mobile phones do not guarantee personal data protection. Furthermore, the analysis indicated that patients undergoing Internet interventions experienced at least one adverse event that might be related to treatment. At least, predictive factors have been identified in order to credit or not a health rumour. Conclusions: Trusting digital and connected health can be achieved if patients, health care professionals, and industrials build a shared model of health data management integrating ethics rules. Only increasing efforts in education with regards of digital health would help reach this goal., This would not resolve all frauds and security issues but at least improve their detection.

scholarly journals Do tabloids poison the well of social media? Explaining democratically dysfunctional news sharing

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (11) ◽  
pp. 4255-4274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Chadwick ◽  
Cristian Vaccari ◽  
Ben O’Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
News Article ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Status ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
News Sharing

The use of social media for sharing political information and the status of news as an essential raw material for good citizenship are both generating increasing public concern. We add to the debates about misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news” using a new theoretical framework and a unique research design integrating survey data and analysis of observed news sharing behaviors on social media. Using a media-as-resources perspective, we theorize that there are elective affinities between tabloid news and misinformation and disinformation behaviors on social media. Integrating four data sets we constructed during the 2017 UK election campaign—individual-level data on news sharing ( N = 1,525,748 tweets), website data ( N = 17,989 web domains), news article data ( N = 641 articles), and data from a custom survey of Twitter users ( N = 1313 respondents)—we find that sharing tabloid news on social media is a significant predictor of democratically dysfunctional misinformation and disinformation behaviors. We explain the consequences of this finding for the civic culture of social media and the direction of future scholarship on fake news.

scholarly journals Infodemia and COVID-19: a text mining analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
W De Caro
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Text Mining ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Health Authorities ◽  
Health Agencies ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Twitter Activity

Abstract Introduction Covid-19 epidemic lead a huge use of social media to comment and spread information from the widest sources. Infodemia looks at excessive amount of information circulating, which makes it difficult to orientate communities on a given topic due to the difficulty of identifying reliable sources. Using text mining analysis it is possible to identify what drives public conversation and impact of Covid-19. Methods Public perceptions in emergencies is traditionally measured with surveys. However, to have a global sight of the pandemia, Twitter represents a powerful tool which gives real-time monitoring of public perception. The study aimed to: 1) monitor the use of the terms “Covid-19” or “Coronarivus” over time; and 2) to conduct a specific text and sentiment analysis. Results Between January 10 and May 8, 2020, over 600 million tweets were retrieved. Of those 600.000 tweets were randomly selected, coded, and analyzed. About 10% of cases were identified as misinformation. Public figures, experts in public health, and virologists represent the most popular sources in comparison to the official government and health agencies. There is a positive correlation between Twitter activity peaks and COVID-19 infection peaks. Text mining analysis was carried out, as well as a content analysis, also in order to identify changing emotions and sentiments during time. This analysis, particularly during the lockdown, clearly shows that participation on social media can potentially have an effect on building social capital and social support. Conclusions This study confirms that using social media to conduct infodemic studies is an important area of development in public health arena. COVID-19 tweets were primarily used to disseminate information from credible sources, but were also a source of opinions, emotion and experiences. Tweets can be used for real-time content analysis and knowledge translation research, allowing health authorities to respond to public concerns. Key messages Social media is crucial for health information. Infodemia as new way for study health.

scholarly journals Fake News and the “Wild Wide Web”: A Study of Elementary Students’ Reliability Reasoning

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 121
Author(s):  
Jodi Pilgrim ◽  
Sheri Vasinda
Keyword(s):  
Elementary Students ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Descriptive Data ◽  
Website Evaluation ◽  
Basic Understanding ◽  
Text Features ◽  
Online Texts ◽  
Selection Of

Online research presents unique challenges for elementary students as they develop and extend fundamental literacy skills to various media. Some features of internet text differ from that of traditional print, contributing to the challenges of discerning “fake news.” Readers must understand how to navigate online texts to conduct research effectively, while applying critical thinking to determine the reliability of online information. Descriptive data from an ongoing study revealed that children in grades 1–5 lack some basic understanding of how to search the “wild wide web.” Just as children benefit from explicit instruction related to text features, children benefit from instruction related to the features of the internet. This article presents a study of website evaluation that occurs early in the search process prior to the selection of a particular website or article. The application of the web literacy skills required to conduct an internet search is addressed, and recommendations prompt teachers to consider searches beyond the “walled garden,” as well as ways to handle the “messiness” of internet exploration.

scholarly journals Social Media and Fake News in the Post-Truth Era: The Manipulation of Politics in the Election Process

2020 ◽  
pp. 177-196
Author(s):  
Turgay Yerlikaya ◽  
Seca Toker
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Election Process ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Positive Effect

This article focuses on how virtual social networks affect socio-political life. The main theme of the article is how social networks such as Facebook and Twitter can direct voters’ electoral preferences, especially during election time, through the dissemination of manipulative content and fake news. The use of social media, which was initially thought to have a positive effect on democratization, has been extensively discussed in recent years as threat to democracy. Examples from the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, France, Brexit, Germany, the UK and Turkey will be used to illustrate the risks that social networks pose to democracy, especially during election periods.

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