Conventional preventive measures during pandemics include social distancing and lockdown. Such measures in the time of social media brought about a new set of challenges – vulnerability to the toxic impact of online misinformation is high. A case in point is COVID-19. As the virus propagates, so does the associated misinformation and fake news about it leading to an infodemic. Since the outbreak, there has been a surge of studies investigating various aspects of the pandemic. Of interest to this chapter are studies centering on datasets from online social media platforms where the bulk of the public discourse happens. The main goal is to support the fight against negative infodemic by (1) contributing a diverse set of curated relevant datasets; (2) offering relevant areas to study using the datasets; and (3) demonstrating how relevant datasets, strategies, and state-of-the-art IT tools can be leveraged in managing the pandemic.
TopIntroduction
Human history is intertwined with various pandemics, infectious disease on a global scale, events resulting in a dramatic high mortality rate and economic hardship. Pandemics from diseases such as smallpox, tuberculosis, and the Spanish flu resulted in a large number of lost lives (Kaur, 2020). Recently, one of the defining moments of the year 2020 is the outbreak of the zoonotic Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) that radically disrupts normal social interactions. The virus was first reported by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on December 31, 2019, in Wuhan, China. At the time of writing this chapter, the recent statistics from the WHO reported 108,153,741 confirmed cases and 2,381,295 confirmed deaths across 223 countries, areas or territories. It is easy to be oblivious of early warnings despite apparent reasons suggesting otherwise. When the prevailing pandemic was first reported, many nations were heedless in taking proactive measures to a point that the outbreak quickly overwhelmed healthcare facilities making it difficult to attend to ailing people, fatigue from health workers, distress and grieve from families of ailing and lost ones. The lacklustre attitude from some leaders and the politicisation of the pandemic further compounds the situation, resulting in confusing and conflicting narratives. As the pandemic crisis exacerbates, many forms of preventive and curative responses have been imposed to curtail the scale of spread and negative impact of the pandemic. Figure 1 shows a summary of the total number of cases globally1.
Figure 1. A summary of the total number of COVID-19 global cases.
Various reactionary approaches, sometimes impulsive, have been used to flatten infection peaks to avoid overwhelming the prevailing healthcare facilities and alleviating the associated financial challenges. Typical measures to slow down the infection rate include disinfection, social distancing, contact tracing, isolation/quarantine and some curative measures. Following the traditional approach of mitigating spread, the infamous lockdown measure introduced to curb the virus spread has altered many aspects of social routines in which demand for online-based services skyrocketed. While modern-day online social media networks, such as Facebook2 and Twitter3, facilitate the spread of information to a wide audience, making it a useful facility for instant information updates and socialisation, they also present new sets of challenges. Figure 2 shows a summary of the major events4 since the outbreak. With a substantial proportion of the populace confined to their homes for a long period, vulnerability to the toxic impact of online misinformation is high during the COVID-19 outbreak. There is a growing body of work tackling many problems associated with the outbreak. For instance, concerning infodemic5, coined to denote the online outburst of pandemic-related information, especially misinformation, researchers have been curating and documenting various datasets about COVID-19 pandemic. Of interest to this chapter are studies centring on online datasets, with emphasis on the online social media platforms where the bulk of the public discourse happen, regarding spurious content associated with the pandemic. Ultimately, the chapter’s goal is to support the fight against online misinformation with particular emphasis on pandemic-related datasets.
Figure 2. A chronicle of some major events or topical issues related to the management of the pandemic.
Many aspects of the pandemic can be explored using such data collection – from leveraging benchmarking datasets to assess the veracity of information related to the pandemic (infodemic) to the more advanced task of modelling and tracing the propagation of the virus. Consequently, the chapter will, among other benefits, better inform how to ensure that relevant pandemic-related content dominates, and irrelevant content is suppressed, especially during critical times of the pandemic. Noting the growing vulnerability to the toxic impact of online misinformation during the pandemic, the contributions of the chapter include: