Critical Impact of Social Networks Infodemic on Defeating Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: Twitter-Based Study and Research Directions

• Main Authors: Mourad, Azzam, Srour, Ali, Harmanani, Haidar, Jenainatiy, Cathia, Arafeh, Mohamad
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 18-05-2020
• Subjects: Computer Science - Computation and Language; Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2005.08820

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9223699 (2020) News creation and consumption has been changing since the advent of social
media. An estimated 2.95 billion people in 2019 used social media worldwide.
The widespread of the Coronavirus COVID-19 resulted with a tsunami of social
media. Most platforms were used to transmit relevant news, guidelines and
precautions to people. According to WHO, uncontrolled conspiracy theories and
propaganda are spreading faster than the COVID-19 pandemic itself, creating an
infodemic and thus causing psychological panic, misleading medical advises, and
economic disruption. Accordingly, discussions have been initiated with the
objective of moderating all COVID-19 communications, except those initiated
from trusted sources such as the WHO and authorized governmental entities. This
paper presents a large-scale study based on data mined from Twitter. Extensive
analysis has been performed on approximately one million COVID-19 related
tweets collected over a period of two months. Furthermore, the profiles of
288,000 users were analyzed including unique users profiles, meta-data and
tweets context. The study noted various interesting conclusions including the
critical impact of the (1) exploitation of the COVID-19 crisis to redirect
readers to irrelevant topics and (2) widespread of unauthentic medical
precautions and information. Further data analysis revealed the importance of
using social networks in a global pandemic crisis by relying on credible users
with variety of occupations, content developers and influencers in specific
fields. In this context, several insights and findings have been provided while
elaborating computing and non-computing implications and research directions
for potential solutions and social networks management strategies during crisis
periods.