TY - GEN
T1 - A Second Pandemic? Analysis of Fake News About COVID-19 Vaccines in Qatar
AU - Nakov, Preslav
AU - Alam, Firoj
AU - Shaar, Shaden
AU - da San Martino, Giovanni
AU - Zhang, Yifan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Incoma Ltd. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - While COVID-19 vaccines are finally becoming widely available, a second pandemic that revolves around the circulation of anti-vaxxer “fake news” may hinder efforts to recover from the first one. With this in mind, we performed an extensive analysis of Arabic and English tweets about COVID-19 vaccines, with focus on messages originating from Qatar. We found that Arabic tweets contain a lot of false information and rumors, while English tweets are mostly factual. However, English tweets are much more propagandistic than Arabic ones. In terms of propaganda techniques, about half of the Arabic tweets express doubt, and 1/5 use loaded language, while English tweets are abundant in loaded language, exaggeration, fear, name-calling, doubt, and flag-waving. Finally, in terms of framing, Arabic tweets adopt a health and safety perspective, while in English economic concerns dominate.
AB - While COVID-19 vaccines are finally becoming widely available, a second pandemic that revolves around the circulation of anti-vaxxer “fake news” may hinder efforts to recover from the first one. With this in mind, we performed an extensive analysis of Arabic and English tweets about COVID-19 vaccines, with focus on messages originating from Qatar. We found that Arabic tweets contain a lot of false information and rumors, while English tweets are mostly factual. However, English tweets are much more propagandistic than Arabic ones. In terms of propaganda techniques, about half of the Arabic tweets express doubt, and 1/5 use loaded language, while English tweets are abundant in loaded language, exaggeration, fear, name-calling, doubt, and flag-waving. Finally, in terms of framing, Arabic tweets adopt a health and safety perspective, while in English economic concerns dominate.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85114503116
U2 - 10.26615/978-954-452-072-4_114
DO - 10.26615/978-954-452-072-4_114
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85114503116
T3 - International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP
SP - 1010
EP - 1021
BT - International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2021
A2 - Angelova, Galia
A2 - Kunilovskaya, Maria
A2 - Mitkov, Ruslan
A2 - Nikolova-Koleva, Ivelina
PB - Incoma Ltd
T2 - International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing: Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing Methods and Applications, RANLP 2021
Y2 - 1 September 2021 through 3 September 2021
ER -