An Exploratory Study of COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the community. This resulted in 1 500 tweets relating to 1 274 false and 276 partially false claims, respectively. Exploratory analysis of author accounts revealed that the verified twitter handle(including Organisation/celebrity) are also involved in either creating (new tweets) or spreading (retweet) the misinformation. Additionally, we found that false claims propagate faster than partially false claims. Compare to a background corpus of COVID-19 tweets, tweets with misinformation are more often concerned with discrediting other information on social media. Authors use less tentative language and appear to be more driven by concerns of potential harm to others. Our results enable us to suggest gaps in the current scientific coverage of the topic as well as propose actions for authorities and social media users to counter misinformation.Comment: 20 pages, nine figures, four tables. Submitted for peer review, revision

Towards a Better Understanding of Online Influence: Differences in Twitter Communication Between Companies and Influencers

In the last decade, Social Media platforms such as Twitter have gained importance in the various marketing strategies of companies. This work aims to examine the presence of influential content on a textual level, by investigating characteristics of tweets in the context of social impact theory, and its dimension immediacy. To this end, we analysed influential Twitter communication data during Black Friday 2018 with methods from social media analytics such as sentiment analysis and degree centrality. Results show significant differences in communication style between companies and influencers. Companies published longer textual content and created more tweets with a positive sentiment and more first-person pronouns than influencers. These findings shall serve as a basis for a future experimental study to examine the impact of text presence on consumer cognition and the willingness to purchase

Overview of the CLEF–2022 CheckThat! Lab on Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic and Fake News Detection

We describe the fifth edition of the CheckThat! lab, part of the 2022 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The lab evaluates technology supporting tasks related to factuality in multiple languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, German, Spanish, and Turkish. Task 1 asks to identify relevant claims in tweets in terms of check-worthiness, verifiability, harmfullness, and attention-worthiness. Task 2 asks to detect previously fact-checked claims that could be relevant to fact-check a new claim. It targets both tweets and political debates/speeches. Task 3 asks to predict the veracity of the main claim in a news article. CheckThat! was the most popular lab at CLEF-2022 in terms of team registrations: 137 teams. More than one-third (37%) of them actually participated: 18, 7, and 26 teams submitted 210, 37, and 126 official runs for tasks 1, 2, and 3, respectively.</p

Global, regional, and national burden of disorders affecting the nervous system, 1990–2021: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021

BackgroundDisorders affecting the nervous system are diverse and include neurodevelopmental disorders, late-life neurodegeneration, and newly emergent conditions, such as cognitive impairment following COVID-19. Previous publications from the Global Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factor Study estimated the burden of 15 neurological conditions in 2015 and 2016, but these analyses did not include neurodevelopmental disorders, as defined by the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-11, or a subset of cases of congenital, neonatal, and infectious conditions that cause neurological damage. Here, we estimate nervous system health loss caused by 37 unique conditions and their associated risk factors globally, regionally, and nationally from 1990 to 2021.MethodsWe estimated mortality, prevalence, years lived with disability (YLDs), years of life lost (YLLs), and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), with corresponding 95% uncertainty intervals (UIs), by age and sex in 204 countries and territories, from 1990 to 2021. We included morbidity and deaths due to neurological conditions, for which health loss is directly due to damage to the CNS or peripheral nervous system. We also isolated neurological health loss from conditions for which nervous system morbidity is a consequence, but not the primary feature, including a subset of congenital conditions (ie, chromosomal anomalies and congenital birth defects), neonatal conditions (ie, jaundice, preterm birth, and sepsis), infectious diseases (ie, COVID-19, cystic echinococcosis, malaria, syphilis, and Zika virus disease), and diabetic neuropathy. By conducting a sequela-level analysis of the health outcomes for these conditions, only cases where nervous system damage occurred were included, and YLDs were recalculated to isolate the non-fatal burden directly attributable to nervous system health loss. A comorbidity correction was used to calculate total prevalence of all conditions that affect the nervous system combined.FindingsGlobally, the 37 conditions affecting the nervous system were collectively ranked as the leading group cause of DALYs in 2021 (443 million, 95% UI 378–521), affecting 3·40 billion (3·20–3·62) individuals (43·1%, 40·5–45·9 of the global population); global DALY counts attributed to these conditions increased by 18·2% (8·7–26·7) between 1990 and 2021. Age-standardised rates of deaths per 100 000 people attributed to these conditions decreased from 1990 to 2021 by 33·6% (27·6–38·8), and age-standardised rates of DALYs attributed to these conditions decreased by 27·0% (21·5–32·4). Age-standardised prevalence was almost stable, with a change of 1·5% (0·7–2·4). The ten conditions with the highest age-standardised DALYs in 2021 were stroke, neonatal encephalopathy, migraine, Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, diabetic neuropathy, meningitis, epilepsy, neurological complications due to preterm birth, autism spectrum disorder, and nervous system cancer.InterpretationAs the leading cause of overall disease burden in the world, with increasing global DALY counts, effective prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation strategies for disorders affecting the nervous system are needed

FakeKG: A Knowledge Graph of Fake Claims for Improving Automated Fact-Checking (Student Abstract)

False information could be dangerous if the claim is not debunked timely. Fact-checking organisations get a high volume of claims on different topics with immense velocity. The efficiency of the fact-checkers decreases due to 3V problems volume, velocity and variety. Especially during crises or elections, fact-checkers cannot handle user requests to verify the claim. Until now, no real-time curable centralised corpus of fact-checked articles is available. Also, the same claim is fact-checked by multiple fact-checking organisations with or without judgement. To fill this gap, we introduce FakeKG: A Knowledge Graph-Based approach for improving Automated Fact-checking. FakeKG is a centralised knowledge graph containing fact-checked articles from different sources that can be queried using the SPARQL endpoint. The proposed FakeKG can prescreen claim requests and filter them if the claim is already fact-checked and provide a judgement to the claim. It will also categorise the claim's domain so that the fact-checker can prioritise checking the incoming claims into different groups like health and election. This study proposes an approach for creating FakeKG and its future application for mitigating misinformation

MOD: Metadata for Ontology Description and Publication

Ontology is an important artifact of Semantic Web applications. Today, there are an enormous number of ontologies available on the Web. Even so, finding and identifying the right ontology is not easy. This is because the majority of ontologies are either not described or described with a general-purpose metadata vocabulary like Dublin Core. On the other hand, ontology construction, irrespective of its types (e.g., general ontology, domain ontology, application ontology), is an expensive affair both in terms of human resources and other infrastructural resources. Hence, the ideal situation would be to reuse the existing ontologies to reduce the development effort and cost, and also to improve the quality of the original ontology. In the current work we present an ontology metadata vocabulary called Metadata for Ontology Description and publication (MOD). To design the vocabulary, we also propose a set of generic guiding principles and a well-established methodology which take into account real concerns of the ontology users and practitioners

Who shapes crisis communication on Twitter? An analysis of German influencers during the COVID-19 pandemic

Twitter is becoming an increasingly important platform for disseminating information during crisis situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Effective crisis communication on Twitter can shape the public perception of the crisis, influence adherence to preventative measures, and thus affect public health. Influential accounts are particularly important as they reach large audiences quickly. This study identifies influential German-language accounts from almost 3 million German tweets collected between January and May 2020 by constructing a retweet network and calculating PageRank centrality values. We capture the volatility of crisis communication by structuring the analysis into seven stages based on key events during the pandemic and profile influential accounts into roles. Our analysis shows that news and journalist accounts were influential throughout all phases, while government accounts were particularly important shortly before and after the lockdown was instantiated. We discuss implications for crisis communication during health crises and for analyzing long-term crisis data