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Lecture 1B Slides

The document discusses the rise of fake news during the COVID-19 pandemic and the expansion of fact-checking efforts, particularly in the Global South. It introduces a novel computational method for identifying and clustering topics in tweets from Brazilian fact-checking organizations, revealing the interplay between politics and health during the crisis. The authors propose this method as a valuable tool for topic modeling and suggest directions for future research.

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39 views1 page

Lecture 1B Slides

The document discusses the rise of fake news during the COVID-19 pandemic and the expansion of fact-checking efforts, particularly in the Global South. It introduces a novel computational method for identifying and clustering topics in tweets from Brazilian fact-checking organizations, revealing the interplay between politics and health during the crisis. The authors propose this method as a valuable tool for topic modeling and suggest directions for future research.

Uploaded by

kaceyedelstein04
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Wilson Ceron, Mathias-Felipe de-Lima-Santos, Marcos G.

Quiles,
Fake news agenda in the era of COVID-19: Identifying trends through fact-checking
content,
Online Social Networks and Media,
Volume 21,
2021,
100116,
ISSN 2468-6964,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.osnem.2020.100116.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468696420300562)
Abstract: The rise of social media has ignited an unprecedented circulation of
false information in our society. It is even more evident in times of crisis, such
as the COVID-19 pandemic. Fact-checking efforts have significantly expanded and
have been touted as among the most promising solutions to fake news. Several
studies have reported the development of fact-checking organizations in Western
societies, albeit little attention has been given to the Global South. Here, to
fill this gap, we introduce a novel Markov-inspired computational method for
identifying topics in tweets. In contrast to other topic modeling approaches, our
method clusters topics and their current evolution in a predefined time window. To
conduct our experiments, we collected data from Twitter accounts of two Brazilian
fact-checking outlets and presented the topics debunked by these initiatives in
fortnights throughout the pandemic. By comparing these organizations, we could
identify similarities and differences in what was shared by them. Our method
resulted in an important technique to cluster topics in a wide range of scenarios,
including an infodemic – a period overabundance of the same information. In
particular, our results revealed a complex intertwining between politics and the
health crisis during this period. We conclude by proposing a novel method which, in
our opinion, is suitable for topic modeling and also an agenda for future research.
Keywords: Fact-checking; Fake news; COVID-19; Pandemic; Social network; Twitter;
Infodemic; Computational method

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