Abstract
This paper focuses on infodemic response using semi-automated application, seeking to curtail the misinformation of COVID-19 related news and support reliable information dissemination in Ethiopia. We analyze the emerging news trend about COVID-19 in selected social media sites (Facebook and Twitter) and Language (Amharic/English) using the information extraction tool that we developed. This web-crawling tool extracts posts and tweets that have larger audience, high engagement and reaction in Ethiopian popular social media pages and profiles. Expert fact-checkers (group of three to five experts) are then used to verify the veracity and correctness of each of the selected posts/tweets. Posts and tweets are selected based on the keyword patterns emerged from the analysis. The system will present a dashboard to the experts with the required information to label the news as misinformation and educative (opted two broad categories) decided at this stage. The verified news and information will be pushed to various social-media sites, conventional media and to our COVID-19 related information dissemination website. This will provide counter-information with better evidence and proactively flag misinformation and disinformation, and furthermore convey accurate and timely information as educative. This can be achieved through three phase (problem identification, solution design and evaluation) design science approach by emphasizing the connection between knowledge and practice.
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This Research work is funded by Addis Ababa University Research and Technology Transfer office.
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Belay, E.G. et al. (2020). Towards Curtailing Infodemic in the Era of COVID-19: A Contextualized Solution for Ethiopia. In: Stephanidis, C., et al. HCI International 2020 – Late Breaking Papers: Interaction, Knowledge and Social Media. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12427. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60152-2_17
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