Developing Approaches to Detect and Mitigate COVID-19 Misinfodemic in Social Networks for Proactive Policymaking

ABSTRACT

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, people have grown more reliant on social media for obtaining news, information, and entertainment. However, the information environment has become a breeding ground for disinformation tactics. Formal recommendations from medical experts are becoming muffled by the avalanche of toxic content and social media echo chambers are being created in hopes that users only consume stories that support certain beliefs. Despite the advantages of utilizing online social networks (OSNs), a consensus is emerging suggesting the presence of an ever-growing population of malicious actors who utilize these networks to spread misinformation and harm others. These actors are using advanced techniques and are engaging on multiple platforms to propagate their disinformation campaigns. As such, researchers have had to evolve their methods to detect disinformation. In this chapter, we present novel multimethod socio-computational approaches to analyze disinformation content and actors on OSNs during the initial months after COVID-19 was made public. These techniques are presented as case studies in narrative analysis of COVID-19 misinformation themes on blogs, identifying anti-lockdown protestor coordination through connective action on Twitter, analysis of hate speech and divisive discourse on YouTube through toxicity analysis, and modeling of misinformation contagion using an epidemiological approach. We end the chapter by presenting a COVID-19 misinformation tracker tool developed in collaboration with the Arkansas Office of the Attorney General. Our results offer policymakers valuable data to make informed decisions about the information environment and derive appropriate and timely countermeasures to combat insidious forms of cyber threats. Our efforts demonstrate that when researchers coordinate with policymakers it can make a difference, especially when that coordination remains an ongoing process. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.