COVID-19 in Bulgarian Social Media: Factuality, Harmfulness, Propaganda, and Framing

Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 997–1009 Sep 1–3, 2021. https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-072-4_113 997 COVID-19 in Bulgarian Social Media: Factuality, Harmfulness, Propaganda, and Framing 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 With the emergence of the COVID-19 pan- demic, the political and the medical aspects of disinformation merged as the problem got ele- vated to a whole new level to become the first global infodemic. Fighting this infodemic is currently ranked very high on the list of prior- ities of the World Health Organization, with dangers ranging from promoting fake cures, rumors, and conspiracy theories to spreading xenophobia and panic. With this in mind, we studied how COVID-19 is discussed in Bulgar- ian social media in terms of factuality, harm- fulness, propaganda, and framing. We found that most Bulgarian tweets contain verifiable factual claims, are factually true, are of po- tential public interest, are not harmful, and are too trivial to fact-check; moreover, zoom- ing into harmful tweets, we found that they spread not only rumors but also panic. We further analyzed articles shared in Bulgarian partisan pro/con-COVID-19 Facebook groups and found that propaganda is more prevalent in skeptical articles, which use doubt, flag wav- ing, and slogans to convey their message; in contrast, concerned ones appeal to emotions, fear, and authority; moreover, skeptical arti- cles frame the issue as one of quality of life, policy, legality, economy, and politics, while concerned articles focus on health & safety. 1 Introduction The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has brought an unprecedented situation with a lot of uncertainty: as this was a new disease, very little was known about it. This created an information void, where there was a lot of demand but little sup- ply of reliable new information: a perfect breeding ground for all kinds of rumors and conspiracy theo- ries, whose spread was facilitated by social media, which in turn optimized for user engagement (yet, later, they did put serious efforts in trying to limit the spread of false claims about COVID-19). Unlike previous events that attracted a lot of disinformation, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a new powerful blending of medical and political disinformation, which re- sulted in the first global infodemic. Indeed, shortly after having declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, the World Health Organization had to engage in counter-measures against the growing infodemic, which it ranked among its top priorities in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.1 Figure 1 shows some tweets that demonstrate how COVID-19 is discussed in Bulgarian social media. We can see that the problem goes beyond factuality: while some tweets spread rumors (Fig- ure 1a), other discuss cure (Figure 1b). Indeed, the infodemic quickly extended to promoting bad cure, instilling panic, xenophobia, racism, and distrust in authorities, among others. (Alam et al., 2021b) Figure 1: Bulgarian tweets with English translation. 1https://www.who.int/health-topics/ infodemic 998 …

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