A Second Pandemic? Analysis of Fake News about COVID-19 Vaccines in Qatar

Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 1010–1021 Sep 1–3, 2021. https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-072-4_114 1010 A Second Pandemic? Analysis of Fake News About COVID-19 Vaccines in Qatar Preslav Nakov, 1 Firoj Alam,1 Shaden Shaar,1 Giovanni Da San Martino2 and Yifan Zhang1 1 Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar 2 University of Padova, Italy {pnakov, fialam, sshaar, yzhang}@hbku.edu.qa, dasan@math.unipd.it Abstract While COVID-19 vaccines are finally becom- ing 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 infor- mation 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. Fi- nally, in terms of framing, Arabic tweets adopt a health and safety perspective, while in En- glish economic concerns dominate. 1 Introduction During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media have become one of the main communication chan- nels for information dissemination and consump- tion, and many people rely on them as their pri- mary source of news (Perrin, 2015), attracted by the broader choice of information sources. Unfor- tunately, over time, social media have also become one of the main channels to spread disinformation. To tackle this issue, a number of (mostly manual) fact-checking initiatives have been launched, and there are over 200 fact-checking organizations cur- rently active worldwide.1 However, these efforts are insufficient, given the scale of disinformation, which, in the time of COVID-19, has grown into the First Global Infodemic (according to the World Health Organization). 1http://tiny.cc/zd1fnz Figure 1: Tweets about COVID-19 and vaccines. Figure 1 shows examples of how online users dis- cuss COVID-19 and vaccines. We can see that the problem goes beyond factuality: there are tweets spreading rumors, discussing action taken, instill- ing panic, making jokes, and promoting bad cure. 1011 For the tweets in Figure 1, we might want to know whether they are factual, harmful, calling for action, etc. (see Section 4.1). It is also impor- tant to understand whether the content of the tweet is propagandistic (Section 4.2), what propaganda techniques are used, as well as the way the issue is framed (Section 4.3). Doing this in a timely manner is crucial to help organizations channel their efforts, and to counter the spread of disinformation, which may cause panic, mistrust, and other problems. With this in mind, we performed an exten- sive analysis of Arabic and English tweets about COVID-19 and vaccines, with focus on messages originating from Qatar. Our analysis focuses on (i) COVID-19 disinformation, (ii) propaganda and its techniques, and (iii) framing. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: • We build and release a …

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