Related papers: The COVID That Wasn't: Counterfactual Journalism U…

Our society is built on a complex web of interdependencies whose effects become manifest during extraordinary events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, with shocks in one system propagating to the others to an exceptional extent. We analyzed…

The sudden widespread menace created by the present global pandemic COVID-19 has had an unprecedented effect on our lives. Man-kind is going through humongous fear and dependence on social media like never before. Fear inevitably leads to…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) presents large risks for society when it is used to create fake news. A crucial factor for fake news to go viral on social media is that users share such content. Here, we aim to shed light on the…

Computational approaches to predicting mental health conditions in social media have been substantially explored in the past years. Multiple reviews have been published on this topic, providing the community with comprehensive accounts of…

We present a new fact-checking benchmark, Check-COVID, that requires systems to verify claims about COVID-19 from news using evidence from scientific articles. This approach to fact-checking is particularly challenging as it requires…

Fake news on social media has become a hot topic of research as it negatively impacts the discourse of real news in the public. Specifically, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rise of inaccurate and misleading information due to the…

The rapid outbreak of COVID-19 has caused humanity to come to a stand-still and brought with it a plethora of other problems. COVID-19 is the first pandemic in history when humanity is the most technologically advanced and relies heavily on…

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has claimed the lives of over 350,000 people and infected more than 6 million people worldwide. Several search engines have surfaced to provide researchers with additional tools to find and retrieve…

COVID-19 has brought about many changes in social dynamics. Stay-at-home orders and disruptions in school teaching can influence bullying behavior in-person and online, both of which leading to negative outcomes in victims. To study…

We present a novel approach incorporating transformer-based language models into infectious disease modelling. Text-derived features are quantified by tracking high-density clusters of sentence-level representations of Reddit posts within…

Large generative language models such as GPT-2 are well-known for their ability to generate text as well as their utility in supervised downstream tasks via fine-tuning. Our work is twofold: firstly we demonstrate via human evaluation that…

Publicly available social media archives facilitate research in the social sciences and provide corpora for training and testing a wide range of machine learning and natural language processing methods. With respect to the recent outbreak…

The role of social media in information dissemination and agenda-setting has significantly expanded in recent years. By offering real-time interactions, online platforms have become invaluable tools for studying societal responses to…

The purpose of this study is to analyse COVID-19 related news published across different geographical places, in order to gain insights in reporting differences. The COVID-19 pandemic had a major outbreak in January 2020 and was followed by…

ChatGPT is a conversational artificial intelligence that is a member of the generative pre-trained transformer of the large language model family. This text generative model was fine-tuned by both supervised learning and reinforcement…

The way people respond to messaging from public health organizations on social media can provide insight into public perceptions on critical health issues, especially during a global crisis such as COVID-19. It could be valuable for…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for natural language generation, with applications spanning from content creation to social simulations. Their ability to mimic human interactions raises both…

The purpose of this case study is to leverage the concepts and tools presented in the preceding chapters and apply them in a real world social cybersecurity context. With the COVID-19 pandemic emerging as a defining event of the 21st…

Since the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the late 2019, it has affected over 200 countries and billions of people worldwide. This has affected the social life of people owing to enforcements, such as "social distancing"…

News creation and consumption has been changing since the advent of social media. An estimated 2.95 billion people in 2019 used social media worldwide. The widespread of the Coronavirus COVID-19 resulted with a tsunami of social media. Most…