Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic in Social Media: A Holistic Perspective and a Call to Arms

Abstract

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, people turned to social media to read and to share timely information including statistics, warnings, advice, and inspirational stories. Unfortunately, alongside all this useful information, there was also a new blending of medical and political misinformation and disinformation, which gave rise to the first global infodemic. While fighting this infodemic is typically thought of in terms of factuality, the problem is much broader as malicious content includes not only fake news, rumors, and conspiracy theories, but also promotion of fake cures, panic, racism, xenophobia, and mistrust in the authorities, among others. This is a complex problem that needs a holistic approach combining the perspectives of journalists, fact-checkers, policymakers, government entities, social media platforms, and society as a whole. With this in mind, we define an annotation schema and detailed annotation instructions that reflect these perspectives. We further deploy a multilingual annotation platform, and we issue a call to arms to the research community and beyond to join the fight by supporting our crowdsourcing annotation efforts. We perform initial annotations using the annotation schema, and our initial experiments demonstrated sizable improvements over the baselines.