Along with COVID-19 pandemic we are also fighting an `infodemic'. Fake news and rumors are rampant on social media. Believing in rumors can cause significant harm. This is further exacerbated at the time of a pandemic. To tackle this, we curate and release a manually annotated dataset of 10,700 social media posts and articles of real and fake news on COVID-19. We benchmark the annotated dataset with four machine learning baselines - Decision Tree, Logistic Regression , Gradient Boost , and Support Vector Machine (SVM). We obtain the best performance of 93.46\% F1-score with SVM.

The United States of America

Context

The dataset contains the list of COVID Fake News/Claims which is shared all over the internet.

Content

1. Headlines: String attribute consisting of the headlines/fact shared.
2. Outcome: It is binary data where 0 means the headline is fake and 1 means that it is true.

Inspiration

In many research portals, there was this common question in which the combined fake news dataset is available or not. This led to the publication of this dataset.

India

The dataset contains fake and real news. There are 16898 unique rows that points out the numbers of news as well. The dataset is merged from two datasets one is from different source of CBC news (link: https://zenodo.org/record/4722470) and other is from different web portals (link: https://zenodo.org/record/4282522).

Data Description:

Text: Text contains the news that is either fake or real.

Outcome: Contains either fake or real which is the status of the news.

This dataset contains the latest world news related to Covid-19 and Covid vaccine with the news article's available metadata.

MM-COVID is a dataset for fake news detection related to COVID-19. This dataset provides the multilingual fake news and the relevant social context. It contains 3,981 pieces of fake news content and 7,192 trustworthy information from English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, French and Italian, 6 different languages.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID19) time series that lists confirmed cases, reported deaths, and reported recoveries. Data is broken down by country (and sometimes by sub-region).

Coronavirus disease (COVID19) is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV2) and has had an effect worldwide. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a pandemic, currently indicating more than 118,000 cases of coronavirus disease in more than 110 countries and territories around the world.

This dataset contains the latest news related to Covid-19 and it was fetched with the help of Newsdata.io news API.

Constraint@AAAI2021 - COVID19 Fake News Detection in English @misc{patwa2020fighting, title={Fighting an Infodemic: COVID-19 Fake News Dataset}, author={Parth Patwa and Shivam Sharma and Srinivas PYKL and Vineeth Guptha and Gitanjali Kumari and Md Shad Akhtar and Asif Ekbal and Amitava Das and Tanmoy Chakraborty}, year={2020}, eprint={2011.03327}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, primaryClass={cs.CL} }

A COVID-19 misinformation / fake news / rumor / disinformation dataset collected from online social media and news websites. Usage note:Misinformation detection, classification, tracking, prediction.Misinformation sentiment analysis.Rumor veracity classification, comment stance classification.Rumor tracking, social network analysis.Data pre-processing and data analysis codes available at https://github.com/MickeysClubhouse/COVID-19-rumor-datasetPlease see full info in our GitHub link.Cite us:Cheng, Mingxi, et al. "A COVID-19 Rumor Dataset." Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021): 1566.@article{cheng2021covid, title={A COVID-19 Rumor Dataset}, author={Cheng, Mingxi and Wang, Songli and Yan, Xiaofeng and Yang, Tianqi and Wang, Wenshuo and Huang, Zehao and Xiao, Xiongye and Nazarian, Shahin and Bogdan, Paul}, journal={Frontiers in Psychology}, volume={12}, pages={1566}, year={2021}, publisher={Frontiers} }

The cCOVID-News dataset is a publicly available Chinese text retrieval dataset created from COVID-19 news articles. It contains a collection of text data related to COVID-19, and it is used as part of the out-of-domain evaluation for the DuReader retrieval benchmark.

the removal of special characters and non-vital information is performed.The file contains columns such as:Date: publish date of news article country: country the article is abouttext: the news article contentlabel: fake or real news labelURL: the fact-checked sitesource: original news source site

The FakeCovid dataset contains 5182 fact-checked news articles for COVID-19 collected from January to May 2020.

Introduction

There are several works based on Natural Language Processing on newspaper reports. Mining opinions from headlines [ 1 ] using Standford NLP and SVM by Rameshbhaiet. Al.compared several algorithms on a small and large dataset. Rubinet. al., in their paper [ 2 ], created a mechanism to differentiate fake news from real ones by building a set of characteristics of news according to their types. The purpose was to contribute to the low resource data available for training machine learning algorithms. Doumitet. al.in [ 3 ] have implemented LDA, a topic modeling approach to study bias present in online news media.

However, there are not many NLP research invested in studying COVID-19. Most applications include classification of chest X-rays and CT-scans to detect presence of pneumonia in lungs [ 4 ], a consequence of the virus. Other research areas include studying the genome sequence of the virus[ 5 ][ 6 ][ 7 ] and replicating its structure to fight and find a vaccine. This research is crucial in battling the pandemic. The few NLP based research publications are sentiment classification of online tweets by Samuel et el [ 8 ] to understand fear persisting in people due to the virus. Similar work has been done using the LSTM network to classify sentiments from online discussion forums by Jelodaret. al.[ 9 ]. NKK dataset is the first study on a comparatively larger dataset of a newspaper report on COVID-19, which contributed to the virus’s awareness to the best of our knowledge.

2 Data-set Introduction

2.1 Data Collection

We accumulated 1000 online newspaper report from United States of America (USA) on COVID-19. The newspaper includes The Washington Post (USA) and StarTribune (USA). We have named it as “Covid-News-USA-NNK”. We also accumulated 50 online newspaper report from Bangladesh on the issue and named it “Covid-News-BD-NNK”. The newspaper includes The Daily Star (BD) and Prothom Alo (BD). All these newspapers are from the top provider and top read in the respective countries. The collection was done manually by 10 human data-collectors of age group 23- with university degrees. This approach was suitable compared to automation to ensure the news were highly relevant to the subject. The newspaper online sites had dynamic content with advertisements in no particular order. Therefore there were high chances of online scrappers to collect inaccurate news reports. One of the challenges while collecting the data is the requirement of subscription. Each newspaper required $1 per subscriptions. Some criteria in collecting the news reports provided as guideline to the human data-collectors were as follows:

The headline must have one or more words directly or indirectly related to COVID-19.

The content of each news must have 5 or more keywords directly or indirectly related to COVID-19.

The genre of the news can be anything as long as it is relevant to the topic. Political, social, economical genres are to be more prioritized.

Avoid taking duplicate reports.

Maintain a time frame for the above mentioned newspapers.

To collect these data we used a google form for USA and BD. We have two human editor to go through each entry to check any spam or troll entry.

2.2 Data Pre-processing and Statistics

Some pre-processing steps performed on the newspaper report dataset are as follows:

Remove hyperlinks.

Remove non-English alphanumeric characters.

Remove stop words.

Lemmatize text.

While more pre-processing could have been applied, we tried to keep the data as much unchanged as possible since changing sentence structures could result us in valuable information loss. While this was done with help of a script, we also assigned same human collectors to cross check for any presence of the above mentioned criteria.

The primary data statistics of the two dataset are shown in Table 1 and 2.

Table 1: Covid-News-USA-NNK data statistics

No of words per headline

7 to 20

No of words per body content

150 to 2100

Table 2: Covid-News-BD-NNK data statistics No of words per headline

10 to 20

No of words per body content

100 to 1500

2.3 Dataset Repository

We used GitHub as our primary data repository in account name NKK^1. Here, we created two repositories USA-NKK^2 and BD-NNK^3. The dataset is available in both CSV and JSON format. We are regularly updating the CSV files and regenerating JSON using a py script. We provided a python script file for essential operation. We welcome all outside collaboration to enrich the dataset.

3 Literature Review

Natural Language Processing (NLP) deals with text (also known as categorical) data in computer science, utilizing numerous diverse methods like one-hot encoding, word embedding, etc., that transform text to machine language, which can be fed to multiple machine learning and deep learning algorithms.

Some well-known applications of NLP includes fraud detection on online media sites[ 10 ], using authorship attribution in fallback authentication systems[ 11 ], intelligent conversational agents or chatbots[ 12 ] and machine translations used by Google Translate[ 13 ]. While these are all downstream tasks, several exciting developments have been made in the algorithm solely for Natural Language Processing tasks. The two most trending ones are BERT[ 14 ], which uses bidirectional encoder-decoder architecture to create the transformer model, that can do near-perfect classification tasks and next-word predictions for next generations, and GPT-3 models released by OpenAI[ 15 ] that can generate texts almost human-like. However, these are all pre-trained models since they carry huge computation cost. Information Extraction is a generalized concept of retrieving information from a dataset. Information extraction from an image could be retrieving vital feature spaces or targeted portions of an image; information extraction from speech could be retrieving information about names, places, etc[ 16 ]. Information extraction in texts could be identifying named entities and locations or essential data. Topic modeling is a sub-task of NLP and also a process of information extraction. It clusters words and phrases of the same context together into groups. Topic modeling is an unsupervised learning method that gives us a brief idea about a set of text. One commonly used topic modeling is Latent Dirichlet Allocation or LDA[17].

Keyword extraction is a process of information extraction and sub-task of NLP to extract essential words and phrases from a text. TextRank [ 18 ] is an efficient keyword extraction technique that uses graphs to calculate the weight of each word and pick the words with more weight to it.

Word clouds are a great visualization technique to understand the overall ’talk of the topic’. The clustered words give us a quick understanding of the content.

4 Our experiments and Result analysis

We used the wordcloud library^4 to create the word clouds. Figure 1 and 3 presents the word cloud of Covid-News-USA- NNK dataset by month from February to May. From the figures 1,2,3, we can point few information:

In February, both the news paper have talked about China and source of the outbreak.

StarTribune emphasized on Minnesota as the most concerned state. In April, it seemed to have been concerned more.

Both the newspaper talked about the virus impacting the economy, i.e, bank, elections, administrations, markets.

Washington Post discussed global issues more than StarTribune.

StarTribune in February mentioned the first precautionary measurement: wearing masks, and the uncontrollable spread of the virus throughout the nation.

While both the newspaper mentioned the outbreak in China in February, the weight of the spread in the United States are more highlighted through out March till May, displaying the critical impact caused by the virus.

We used a script to extract all numbers related to certain keywords like ’Deaths’, ’Infected’, ’Died’ , ’Infections’, ’Quarantined’, Lock-down’, ’Diagnosed’ etc from the news reports and created a number of cases for both the newspaper. Figure 4 shows the statistics of this series. From this extraction technique, we can observe that April was the peak month for the covid cases as it gradually rose from February. Both the newspaper clearly shows us that the rise in covid cases from February to March was slower than the rise from March to April. This is an important indicator of possible recklessness in preparations to battle the virus. However, the steep fall from April to May also shows the positive response against the attack. We used Vader Sentiment Analysis to extract sentiment of the headlines and the body. On average, the sentiments were from -0.5 to -0.9. Vader Sentiment scale ranges from -1(highly negative to 1(highly positive). There were some cases

where the sentiment scores of the headline and body contradicted each other,i.e., the sentiment of the headline was negative but the sentiment of the body was slightly positive. Overall, sentiment analysis can assist us sort the most concerning (most negative) news from the positive ones, from which we can learn more about the indicators related to COVID-19 and the serious impact caused by it. Moreover, sentiment analysis can also provide us information about how a state or country is reacting to the pandemic. We used PageRank algorithm to extract keywords from headlines as well as the body content. PageRank efficiently highlights important relevant keywords in the text. Some frequently occurring important keywords extracted from both the datasets are: ’China’, Government’, ’Masks’, ’Economy’, ’Crisis’, ’Theft’ , ’Stock market’ , ’Jobs’ , ’Election’, ’Missteps’, ’Health’, ’Response’. Keywords extraction acts as a filter allowing quick searches for indicators in case of locating situations of the economy,

CoAID include diverse COVID-19 healthcare misinformation, including fake news on websites and social platforms, along with users' social engagement about such news. CoAID includes 4,251 news, 296,000 related user engagements, 926 social platform posts about COVID-19, and ground truth labels.

Track and monitor Covid-19 related news from the world.

A survey carried out in the United Kingdom in September 2021 found that ** percent of respondents did not take any action after encountering what they believed to be false or misleading information on the COVID-19 outbreak. Whilst this figure was lower than the share who said the same in the 2020 survey, taking no action remained the most common response to fake coronavirus news. Meanwhile, ** percent used a fact checking site or tool to determine whether or not the information they found was true, and ** percent turned to family or friends for help in confirming the legitimacy of news they suspected to be false.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

In March 2020, nearly **** percent of social media users surveyed in Mexico claimed to have received the largest amount of false information regarding COVID-19 via WhatsApp, while **** percent of respondents said Facebook was the platform through which they got the biggest number of fake news on the matter.

From conspiracy theories to fake cures and fake treatments, COVID-19 has become a hot-bed for the spread of misinformation online. It is more important than ever to identify methods to debunk and correct false information online. Detection and characterization of misinformation requires an availability of annotated datasets. Most of the published COVID-19 Twitter datasets are generic, lack annotations or labels, employ automated annotations using transfer learning or semi-supervised methods, or are not specifically designed for misinformation. Annotated datasets are either only focused on "fake news", are small in size, or have less diversity in terms of classes.

Here, we present a novel Twitter misinformation dataset called "CMU-MisCov19" with 4573 annotated tweets over 17 themes around the COVID-19 discourse. We also present our annotation codebook for the different COVID-19 themes on Twitter, along with their descriptions and examples, for the community to use for collecting further annotations. Further details related to the dataset, and our analysis based on this dataset can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.00791. In adherence to the Twitter’s terms and conditions, we do not provide the full tweet JSONs but provide a ".csv" file with the tweet IDs so that the tweets can be rehydrated. We also provide the annotations, and the date of creation for each tweet for the reproduction of the results of our analyses.

Note: If for any reason, you are not able to rehydrate all the tweets, reach out to Shahan Ali Memon at (shahan@nyu.edu).

If you use this data, please cite our paper as follows:

"Shahan Ali Memon and Kathleen M. Carley. Characterizing COVID-19 Misinformation Communities Using a Novel Twitter Dataset, In Proceedings of The 5th International Workshop on Mining Actionable Insights from Social Networks (MAISoN 2020), co-located with CIKM, virtual event due to COVID-19, 2020."

The New York Times is releasing a series of data files with cumulative counts of coronavirus cases in the United States, at the state and county level, over time. We are compiling this time series data from state and local governments and health departments in an attempt to provide a complete record of the ongoing outbreak.

Since late January, The Times has tracked cases of coronavirus in real time as they were identified after testing. Because of the widespread shortage of testing, however, the data is necessarily limited in the picture it presents of the outbreak.

We have used this data to power our maps and reporting tracking the outbreak, and it is now being made available to the public in response to requests from researchers, scientists and government officials who would like access to the data to better understand the outbreak.

The data begins with the first reported coronavirus case in Washington State on Jan. 21, 2020. We will publish regular updates to the data in this repository.