Characterizing the impact of fact-checking on the COVID-19 misinformation combat

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19, a disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, affected the whole world in 2020 by its pandemic impact. This virus has a very high capacity for contamination through contact with other infected people. One of the main ways to fight the virus is to reduce the possibility of contact with the infected population by avoiding the crowding of people. Within this context, the virtual means of communication are being channels of information about the pandemic and also the externalization of users' feelings and opinions. Through social networks, people assume the role of content generators and not just consumers. This leaves room for the spread of misinformation, biased news, and rumors that are originated from laymanship, political and commercial interests. This work aims to characterize how fact-checking agencies have reacted in the combat against false information about COVID-19 on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, seeking to broaden the understanding of misinformation propagated over the internet. During the study, we collected fact-checking articles about COVID-19 written by experts from different countries. Through the verified news, we searched social media posts which misinformation began to be spread. After collecting this data, it was verified how long it took the fact-checking agencies to analyze the veracity of the news. In addition, the texts were processed to detect whether the topics being dealt with by the agencies are, in fact, those with the greatest engagement of users within the analyzed social networks, and also the presence of bots on social media. We compared the collection of fact-checking provided by the Poynter Institute and Google's Fact-Checking API, to identify a uniformity between the databases. The results showed that the response time of agencies was around 23 days in the case of misinformation on Twitter and approximately 6 days on Facebook. © 2022 Owner/Author.