Catching Zika Fever: Application of Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning for Tracking Health Misinformation on Twitter

Abstract

In February 2016, World Health Organization declared the Zika outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. With developing evidence it can cause birth defects, and the Summer Olympics coming up in the worst affected country, Brazil, the virus caught fire on social media. In this work, we use Zika as a case study in building a tool for tracking the misinformation around health concerns on Twitter. We collect more than 13 million tweets regarding the Zika outbreak and track rumors outlined by the World Health Organization and Snopes fact checking website. The tool pipeline, which incorporates health professionals, crowdsourcing, and machine learning, allows us to capture health-related rumors around the world, as well as clarification campaigns by reputable health organizations. We discover an extremely bursty behavior of rumor-related topics, and show that, once the questionable topic is detected, it is possible to identify rumor-bearing tweets using automated techniques.