JMIR Med Inform. 2021 Sep 10. doi: 10.2196/30467. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic put the world in crisis on both physical and psychological health. Simultaneously, a myriad of unverified information flowed on social media and online outlets. The situation was so severe that the World Health Organization identified it as an infodemic in February 2020.
OBJECTIVE: We want to study the propagation patterns and textual transformation of COVID-19 related rumors on a closed-platform.
METHODS: We obtained a dataset of suspicious text messages collected on Taiwan’s most popular instant messaging platform, LINE, between January and July 2020. We proposed a Classification-based Clustering algorithm that could efficiently cluster messages into groups, with each group representing a rumor. For ease of understanding, a group is referred to as a “rumor group”. Messages in a rumor group could be identical or within limited textual differences with one another. Therefore, each message in a rumor group is a form of the rumor.
RESULTS: A total of 936 rumor groups with at least 10 messages were discovered among 114,124 text messages collected from LINE. Among 936 rumors, 396 (42.3%) were related to COVID-19. Of 396 COVID-related rumors, 134 (33.8%) had been fact-checked by IFCN-certified agencies in Taiwan to be false or misleading. Studying the prevalence of Simplified Chinese characters or phrases that originated in China in the messages, we found that COVID-related messages, compared to non-COVID-related messages, were more likely to have been written by non-Taiwanese. The association was statistically significant with p < .01 by the chi-squared independence test. The qualitative investigations of the 3 most popular COVID-19 rumors revealed that key authoritative figures, mostly medical personnel, were often misquoted in the messages. In addition, these rumors resurfaced multiple times after being fact-checked, usually preceded by major societal events or textual transformations.
CONCLUSIONS: To fight infodemic, it is crucial that we first understand why and how a rumor becomes popular. While social media gives rise to an unprecedented number of unverified rumors, it also provides a unique opportunity for us to study rumor propagations and the interactions with society. Therefore, we must put more effort in the areas.
PMID:34623954 | DOI:10.2196/30467
