Author : Arvin Subramanian
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (137 download)
Book Synopsis Fighting Misinformation in Social Media During COVID 19 by : Arvin Subramanian
Download or read book Fighting Misinformation in Social Media During COVID 19 written by Arvin Subramanian and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Purpose:There is so much misinformation, deception, and "false news" about COVID-19 that the World Health Organization's director-general has dubbed it an "infodemic". Social media is used as a tool for spreading this misinformation. Vulnerable and marginalized people are misled, because of the same and they are under a lot of stress. In this paper, we try to come with a solution, a tool to fight this infodemic. With the available data from credible sources, we attempt to verify the credibility of a news item shared on social media.Methodology:The study uses beautifulsoup, a web scraping library to scrape the headline and description of the social media article. The model makes use of library such as scikit learn, pandas, matplotlib, numpy for machine learning to determine whether the shared social media article is factually correct. The model makes use of dataset 'Fake News by Kaggle', available on the internet to verify the social media article. The dataset used in the study predicts the fake news with 96 percent accuracy.Findings:The study contributes the invention of the tool - The TruthFinder, that analyses the factual correctness of social media articles related to COVID 19 instantly. The Truthfinder operates on a very simple algorithm. Once the link of the social media article is given as input. The headline and the description of the article is extracted and inserted in to the machine learning model. Using the data set that is available, the social media article is factually checked. In case, the article is considered fake, related COVID 19 articles from trustable sources are shared to the user.Implications:The model presented in the study is currently a proof of concept. However, in future the authors are working to develop a fully functional mobile app based on the model. This app will be useful to combat the misinformation spread about COVID 19, related to faulty remedies, fear mongering about vaccines and side effects. Along with debunking of false news, Truth Finder also disseminates factually correct articles that are related to the fake news shared. So, that the social media user is better informed to combat the infodemic in future, related to COVID 19.