English

The Coronavirus is a Bioweapon: Analysing Coronavirus Fact-Checked Stories

Social and Information Networks 2021-04-06 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has heightened the need to flag coronavirus-related misinformation, and fact-checking groups have taken to verifying misinformation on the Internet. We explore stories reported by fact-checking groups PolitiFact, Poynter and Snopes from January to June 2020, characterising them into six story clusters before then analyse time-series and story validity trends and the level of agreement across sites. We further break down the story clusters into more granular story types by proposing a unique automated method with a BERT classifier, which can be used to classify diverse story sources, in both fact-checked stories and tweets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.01215,
  title  = {The Coronavirus is a Bioweapon: Analysing Coronavirus Fact-Checked Stories},
  author = {Lynnette Hui Xian Ng and Kathleen M. Carley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.01215},
  year   = {2021}
}