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arXiv · 2104.01215

The Coronavirus is a Bioweapon: Analysing Coronavirus Fact-Checked Stories

Lynnette Hui Xian Ng·Kathleen M. Carley
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Abstract

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has heightened the need to flag coronavirus-related misinformation, and fact-checking groups have taken to verifying misinformation on the Internet. We explore stories reported by fact-checking groups PolitiFact, Poynter and Snopes from January to June 2020, characterising them into six story clusters before then analyse time-series and story validity trends and the level of agreement across sites. We further break down the story clusters into more granular story types by proposing a unique automated method with a BERT classifier, which can be used to classify diverse story sources, in both fact-checked stories and tweets.

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Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Kathleen M. Carley. 2021-04-02. The Coronavirus is a Bioweapon: Analysing Coronavirus Fact-Checked Stories. https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01215

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