Verifying fake news on social media platforms during the COVID-19 outbreak

Abstract

The presence of social media platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic creates an infodemic situation. The users have access to a wide variety of information, which part of it is hoax. It’s a challenge for the users and governmental actors to verify hoaxes. It’s also a challenge to take action against these. This further raises a question of how a governmental actor can take action against hoaxes in a platform that they do not own. We seek the answer to this problem from the users perspective via a survey. We also tried to answer the fact of why it’s so difficult to moderate these platforms, and how can hoaxes be supressed. In our research we found out that searchability is a good way to supress hoaxes.