JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic put the world in crisis on both physical and psychological health. Simultaneously, a myriad of unverified information flowed on social media and online outlets. The situation was so severe that the World Health Organization identified it as an infodemic in February 2020.

Objective:

We want to study the propagation patterns and textual transformation of COVID-19 related rumors on a closed-platform.

Methods:

We obtained a dataset of suspicious text messages collected on Taiwan’s most popular instant messaging platform, LINE, between January and July 2020. We proposed a Classification-based Clustering algorithm that efficiently clusters messages into groups, where each group represents a rumor. For ease of understanding, a group is referred to as a “rumor group”. Messages in a rumor group could be identical or within limited textual differences with one another. Therefore, each message in a rumor group is a form of the rumor.

Results:

A total of 936 rumor groups with at least 10 messages were discovered among 114,124 text messages collected from LINE. Among 936 rumors, 396 (42.3%) were related to COVID-19. Of 396 COVID-related rumors, 134 (33.8%) had been fact-checked by IFCN-certified agencies to be false or misleading. By studying the Chinese characters or idioms used in messages, it is statistically significant that COVID-related messages were more likely to have originated from non-Taiwanese people. By the qualitative investigations of 3 most popular false COVID-19 rumors, we identified that key authoritative figures, mostly medical personnel, were often misquoted in the messages. In addition, these rumors resurfaced multiple times after being fact-checked, usually preceded by major societal events or text transformations.

Conclusions:

To fight infodemic, it is crucial that we first understand why and how a rumor becomes popular. While social media gives rise to an unprecedented number of unverified rumors, it also provides a unique opportunity for us to study rumor propagations and the interactions with society. Therefore, we must put more effort in the areas.