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Fighting Against Fake News During Pandemic Era: Does Providing Related News Help Student Internet Users to Detect COVID-19 Misinformation?

Published: 22 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The COVID-19 “infodemic” has resulted in the widespread dissemination of counterfeit medical advice, hoaxes, fake products, and phoney information about the virus and responses. As a result, computational methods for determining any information’s authenticity to improve trust in public health awareness and policy decisions are profoundly discussed in the scientific community. Even before the pandemic, mis- and disinformation, including fake news, have been observed in the online world in significant numbers for numerous business, political and personal reasons. Moreover, many of these fake news was published from sources believed to be reliable. In contrast, some other fake news was fabricated in a way that would be easily trusted and shared by the general people in social media. COVID-19 related fake news has enormous effects on both the offline and online community, and thus, it challenges government initiatives for proper health intervention. Therefore, interest in research in this area has risen to understand the problem both socially and technically. In this paper, we attempt to understand how we can help student Internet users of colleges from the lower-middle-income country, Bangladesh, in Southeast Asia, to distinguish COVID-19 misinformation. Our study reveals that providing related news as supplementary information to any online news helps students make better decision about news authenticity. Statistical analyses on the survey data show that male students were found to be more accurate than female students to detect mis- and disinformation; students from the urban areas could detect misleading news better than students from villages; and that students from Science background demonstrated overall best performance, while students from Madrasah background, who are all male, could not produce a significant improvement. We conclude that the female students in general and male students of Madrasah, who spend the least amount of time online among all the student Internet users, are the most vulnerable groups to fake news.

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Fighting Against Fake News During Pandemic Era: Does Providing Related News Help Student Internet Users to Detect COVID-19 Misinformation?

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Characteristics of Older People’s Belief in Real and Fake NewsInformation & Media10.15388/Im.2023.97.5997(49-68)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2023
  • (2023)COVID-19 Fake News Detector2023 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC)10.1109/ICNC57223.2023.10074216(463-467)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Toward News Authenticity: Synthesizing Natural Language Processing and Human Expert Opinion to Evaluate NewsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.324148311(11405-11421)Online publication date: 2023
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
WebSci '21: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021
June 2021
328 pages
ISBN:9781450383301
DOI:10.1145/3447535
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 22 June 2021

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Author Tags

  1. COVID-19 Fake News
  2. Identification of Fake News
  3. Mis- and Disinformation in Bangladesh

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WebSci '21
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WebSci '21: WebSci '21 13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021
June 21 - 25, 2021
Virtual Event, United Kingdom

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Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Characteristics of Older People’s Belief in Real and Fake NewsInformation & Media10.15388/Im.2023.97.5997(49-68)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2023
  • (2023)COVID-19 Fake News Detector2023 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC)10.1109/ICNC57223.2023.10074216(463-467)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Toward News Authenticity: Synthesizing Natural Language Processing and Human Expert Opinion to Evaluate NewsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.324148311(11405-11421)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2022)Accost, Accede, or Amplify: Attitudes towards COVID-19 Misinformation on WhatsApp in IndiaProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517588(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022

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