Characterization of Misinformation Dynamics in COVID-19 related health information in online social media
- Funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH)
- Total publications:0 publications
Grant number: unknown
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Key facts
Disease
COVID-19Start & end year
20202021Known Financial Commitments (USD)
$63,106Funder
National Institutes of Health (NIH)Principal Investigator
SAHITI MYNENIResearch Location
United States of AmericaLead Research Institution
The University of Texas Health Science Center at HoustonResearch Priority Alignment
N/A
Research Category
Policies for public health, disease control & community resilience
Research Subcategory
Communication
Special Interest Tags
N/A
Study Type
Non-Clinical
Clinical Trial Details
N/A
Broad Policy Alignment
Pending
Age Group
Not Applicable
Vulnerable Population
Not applicable
Occupations of Interest
Not applicable
Abstract
Abstract:Social media has become predominant as a source of information for many health care consumers. Howeverfalse and misleading information are a pervasive problem in this context. Specifically, during CVID-19 pandemic,misinformation has been a significant public health challenge, impeding the effectiveness of public healthawareness campaigns and resulting in suboptimal responsiveness to the communication of legitimate risk-related information. In the proposed research, we will apply our "Pragmatics to Reveal Intent in Social Media(PRISM) framework to facilitate automated detection of intent and belief attributes underlying COVID-19 relatedmisinformation. The PRISM framework aims to incorporate and integrate communication intent, semantics andstructure of online communication to study social processes and cognitive factors underlying misinformationcomprehension. Such analysis forms the foundational step towards characterization of misinformation seedingand perception in digital social settings, ultimately allowing us to develop scalable and reliable computationalinfrastructure that can help formulate resilient and effective dissemination approaches to negotiatemisinformation spread, easing public health burden and informing policy regulations as needed.