Learn From the Rumors

The COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing global pandemic, which has caused global social and economic disruption. In addition to physical illness, people have to endure the intrusion of rumors psychologically. Thus, it is critical to summarize the correlating infodemic, a significant part of COVID-19, to eventually defeat the epidemic. This article aims to mine the topic distribution and evolution patterns of online rumors by comparing and contrasting COVID-19 rumors from the two most popular rumor-refuting platforms—Jiaozhen in China and Full Fact in the United Kingdom (UK)—via a novel topic mining model, text clustering based on bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), and lifecycle theory. This comparison and contrast can enrich the research of infodemiology based on the spatio-temporal aspect, providing practical guidance for governments, rumor-refuting platforms, and individuals. The comparative study highlights the similarities and differences of online rumors about global public health emergencies across countries.

VERIFYING NEWS DURING THE CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK FACT-CHECKING JOURNALISM

Over the past two decades, fact-checking has expanded from internal media function to 237 independent organizations that actively check and verify the statements of public figures and track disinformation across 78 countries. This study investigates the role of watchdog reformers and fact-checkers as an emerging movement that seeks to secure the accuracy of information by holding accountable public figures and media networks for any errors or the dissemination of false claims across the globe. Three of these organizations located in US. Europe, and Africa are operating as non-profit organizations, and analyzed for this research study: Factcheck.org, Full Fact, and Africa Check. This study conducts textual analysis with a close reading of articles dealing with the coverage of coronavirus from the three websites. The study aims to analyze how these dedicated fact-checking organizations are operating, and how the functions encompassed by social responsibility theory guide their motives. The data is gathered through the collection of fact-checking articles on the organizations’ websites. It is showed that the selected functions of social responsibility theory guide the objectives of the three fact-checking organizations analyzed, which are to supply public affairs information, enlighten society, keep watch against the governments. This study approaches different mechanisms to map areas of convergence as well as divergence within these fact-checking outlets

Toward Automated Factchecking

In an effort to assist factcheckers in the process of factchecking, we tackle the claim detection task, one of the necessary stages prior to determining the veracity of a claim. It consists of identifying the set of sentences, out of a long text, deemed capable of being factchecked. This article is a collaborative work between Full Fact, an independent factchecking charity, and academic partners. Leveraging the expertise of professional factcheckers, we develop an annotation schema and a benchmark for automated claim detection that is more consistent across time, topics, and annotators than are previous approaches. Our annotation schema has been used to crowdsource the annotation of a dataset with sentences from UK political TV shows. We introduce an approach based on universal sentence representations to perform the classification, achieving an F1 score of 0.83, with over 5% relative improvement over the state-of-the-art methods ClaimBuster and ClaimRank. The system was deployed in production and received positive user feedback.

Impacto del discurso político en la difusión de bulos sobre Covid-19. Influencia de la desinformación en públicos y medios

Introducción: El desorden informativo generado por la Covid-19 dibuja un escenario estratégico para la difusión de la falacia y la propaganda política. Las redes sociales, en modo eco-chamber, reproducen el discurso gubernamental de la confusión y la mentira y favorecen un clima de desinformación, desestabilizador de las democracias. En paralelo, los públicos digitales se instalan como prosumidores del bulo político en Twitter y se atisba una tendencia de los medios a combatir las fake news. Metodología: El objetivo principal es conocer qué marcas de desinformación identifican el mensaje del líder, qué papel juegan las audiencias en la producción y difusión de lo falso y qué procesos de verificación desarrollan las agencias de fact-checking (Pagella Politica, Maldito Bulo, Full Fact y PolitiFact) y los medios (La Repubblica, El País, The Guardian y The New York Times) en una situación de máximo riesgo. Sobre una muestra compuesta por tweets publicados por los presidentes de gobierno (n= 272), noticias relacionadas con la Covid-19 (n1=4.543) y bulos detectados en Twitter (n1=200) diseñamos una metodología de análisis de contenido cuantitativo-cualitativo y análisis crítico del discurso político. Se emplea el software SPSS de estadística aplicada. Resultados, discusión y conclusiones: Los resultados revelan el protagonismo de un lenguaje político falaz, que favorece la producción del bulo en la red y requiere la efectividad del sistema de fact-checking de agencias internacionales y medios de comunicación, para combatir lo falso, siempre, y más si cabe en momentos de una pandemia sanitaria sin precedentes.

Full Fact

The UK is a fortunate country with high levels of education, well-developed public and civil society institutions, and some highly trusted media. Nevertheless, there is evidence that the public is substantially misinformed on key issues of public debate, and leading figures have pointed to consistent issues involving the inaccurate use of facts in public debate. Full Fact is the UK’s independent, nonpartisan, factchecking charity. We aim to stop the spread of specific bits of inaccurate information and to secure systemic changes that help make misinformation rarer and less harmful. In this piece we discuss the state of misinformation and disinformation in the UK, the role that we think factchecking has in tackling it, and the research we are eager to learn from to inform our work.

STATISTICAL LITERACY IN PUBLIC DEBATE – EXAMPLES FROM THE UK 2015 GENERAL ELECTION

Full Fact is an independent, non-partisan fact-checking charity. A particular focus is the analysis of factual claims in political debate in the UK; for example, fact-checking claims and counterclaims made during Prime Minister’s questions. Facts do not appear in a vacuum as they are often used as key elements in an effort to make a coherent argument. This paper describes a number of case histories where facts are disputed, drawn from our election work, to give an overview of the contemporary state of statistical literacy among politicians and the media. Common pitfalls in politicians’ claims are set out, along with descriptions of our attempts to close the communication gap between different communities. First published May 2017 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives