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Database Launch: The Archive of COVID-19 Misinformation

Database Launch: The Archive of COVID-19 Misinformation

Announcement 15 May, 2023

The archive of COVID-19 misinformation, which was funded by the Hong Kong Collaborative Research Fund, was officially launched on May 15, 2023. The archive is currently the largest database of COVID-19 misinformation in Chinese.

The archive was built with social media data crawling platform DMDI Insights, which is supported by the School of Journalism and Communication at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, together with the pre-trained model developed by Tencent to filter the COVID-19 related misinformation on Weibo. More than 200,000 pieces of misinformation were detected, and the amount of data is constantly being updated in real-time. This archive offers a data infrastructure for future research on the Chinese COVID-19 misinformation. In addition, as a computer-assisted information dataset, the construction process of the dataset serves as a template and guidance for future research on misinformation. In terms of data storage, the website serves as a storage of historical data of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The archive aims to serve government agencies, media organizations, and educators, especially those who are interested in media literacy development. The archive is developed by a team led by Prof. Ran Wei at School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.