COVID-19 Misinformation Analysis

In March 2020, during the early days of COVID-19 pandemic, we initiated a project that aimed to understand how COVID-19 misinformation were spreading in Thailand and how to stop them. We collected thousands of public messages in social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Pantip (the most famous Thai webboard) that contained some keywords related to misinformation statement such as COVID-19 was a biological weapon, one can prevent COVID by simply keeping the moisture in the throat, or wearing a mask would make the blood acidic. We then asked human volunteers to classify each message whether it was meant to be a misinformation spreader (the one who spreads false information) or corrector (the one who corrects the false information).

The result was eye opening. From eight topics that we analysed, not only we found that almost all COVID-related misinformation spread in clusters, we also found that the presence of a strong group of correctors who had high engagement (“super-correctors”) was highly correlated to the stop of misinformation in each cluster, especially where the presence of super-correctors were many and early. It therefore strongly suggested that a coordinated planning and execution of misinformation correctors such as fake news detection communities, news channels, and highly-influential individuals (“micro-inflencers”) is needed if we want to better a chance of prompt mitigation of misinformation. This finding is being used to inform the coordinated planning of misinformation mitigation network in Thailand led by Cofact Thailand.

The full analysis is available in Thai here.