Regret, Delete, (Do Not) Repeat: An Analysis of Self-Cleaning Practices on Twitter After the Outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic (preprint)

During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people shared their symptoms across Online Social Networks (OSNs) like Twitter, hoping for others' advice or moral support. Prior studies have shown that those who disclose health-related information across OSNs often tend to regret it and delete their publications afterwards. Hence, deleted posts containing sensitive data can be seen as manifestations of online regrets. In this work, we present an analysis of deleted content on Twitter during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. For this, we collected more than 3.67 million tweets describing COVID-19 symptoms (e.g., fever, cough, and fatigue) posted between January and April 2020. We observed that around 24% of the tweets containing personal pronouns were deleted either by their authors or by the platform after one year. As a practical application of the resulting dataset, we explored its suitability for the automatic classification of regrettable content on Twitter.

Overview of the CLEF--2021 CheckThat! Lab on Detecting Check-Worthy Claims, Previously Fact-Checked Claims, and Fake News (preprint)

We describe the fourth edition of the CheckThat! Lab, part of the 2021 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The lab evaluates technology supporting tasks related to factuality, and covers Arabic, Bulgarian, English, Spanish, and Turkish. Task 1 asks to predict which posts in a Twitter stream are worth fact-checking, focusing on COVID-19 and politics (in all five languages). Task 2 asks to determine whether a claim in a tweet can be verified using a set of previously fact-checked claims (in Arabic and English). Task 3 asks to predict the veracity of a news article and its topical domain (in English). The evaluation is based on mean average precision or precision at rank k for the ranking tasks, and macro-F1 for the classification tasks. This was the most popular CLEF-2021 lab in terms of team registrations: 132 teams. Nearly one-third of them participated: 15, 5, and 25 teams submitted official runs for tasks 1, 2, and 3, respectively.

Who shapes crisis communication on Twitter? An analysis of influential German-language accounts during the COVID-19 pandemic (preprint)

Twitter is becoming an increasingly important platform for disseminating information during crisis situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Effective crisis communication on Twitter can shape the public perception of the crisis, influence adherence to preventative measures, and thus affect public health. Influential accounts are particularly important as they reach large audiences quickly. This study identifies influential German-language accounts from almost 3 million German tweets collected between January and May 2020 by constructing a retweet network and calculating PageRank centrality values. We capture the volatility of crisis communication by structuring the analysis into seven stages based on key events during the pandemic and profile influential accounts into roles. Our analysis shows that news and journalist accounts were influential throughout all phases, while government accounts were particularly important shortly before and after the lockdown was instantiated. We discuss implications for crisis communication during health crises and for analyzing long-term crisis data.

AMUSED: An Annotation Framework of Multi-modal Social Media Data (preprint)

In this paper, we present a semi-automated framework called AMUSED for gathering multi-modal annotated data from the multiple social media platforms. The framework is designed to mitigate the issues of collecting and annotating social media data by cohesively combining machine and human in the data collection process. From a given list of the articles from professional news media or blog, AMUSED detects links to the social media posts from news articles and then downloads contents of the same post from the respective social media platform to gather details about that specific post. The framework is capable of fetching the annotated data from multiple platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Reddit. The framework aims to reduce the workload and problems behind the data annotation from the social media platforms. AMUSED can be applied in multiple application domains, as a use case, we have implemented the framework for collecting COVID-19 misinformation data from different social media platforms.

FakeCovid -- A Multilingual Cross-domain Fact Check News Dataset for COVID-19 (preprint)

In this paper, we present a first multilingual cross-domain dataset of 5182 fact-checked news articles for COVID-19, collected from 04/01/2020 to 15/05/2020. We have collected the fact-checked articles from 92 different fact-checking websites after obtaining references from Poynter and Snopes. We have manually annotated articles into 11 different categories of the fact-checked news according to their content. The dataset is in 40 languages from 105 countries. We have built a classifier to detect fake news and present results for the automatic fake news detection and its class. Our model achieves an F1 score of 0.76 to detect the false class and other fact check articles. The FakeCovid dataset is available at Github.

An Exploratory Study of COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter (preprint)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the community. This resulted in 1 500 tweets relating to 1 274 false and 276 partially false claims, respectively. Exploratory analysis of author accounts revealed that the verified twitter handle(including Organisation/celebrity) are also involved in either creating (new tweets) or spreading (retweet) the misinformation. Additionally, we found that false claims propagate faster than partially false claims. Compare to a background corpus of COVID-19 tweets, tweets with misinformation are more often concerned with discrediting other information on social media. Authors use less tentative language and appear to be more driven by concerns of potential harm to others. Our results enable us to suggest gaps in the current scientific coverage of the topic as well as propose actions for authorities and social media users to counter misinformation.