1.

Specific Aims
Social media(SM) provides a means to spread health information to an unprecedented number of users
without real-time verification. Therefore, a combination of rapid emergent health issues and millions of
connected users on social media can significantly amplify health-related misinformation and questionable
health information. Health misinformation has severe concerns regarding people's quality of life and even
their mortality risk (1). The misinformation via social media has has a huge negative impact on public
health outcomes such as vaccine confidence(vaccinations are usually defined as one of the biggest public
health achievements in modern medical history(2)).
A recent systematic review of the prevalence of health misinformation on SM (3) has indicated the need
for developing evidence-based digital policy action plans intended to tackle vaccine misinformation
problems in SM platforms(3). Thus, effective and lifelong learning automatic verification of vaccine
narrative holds essential practical applications in healthcare systems. (4). Moreover, vaccine
misinformation occurs as a distributed incident, and the spread of misinformation usually spreads faster
than accurate information (5). The problem with the current solution is that vaccine narrative
misinformation spreaders avoid automated detection systems by sightly modifying known misinformation
posts (5) (6), therefore there is an unmet need to develop an effective A.I/NLP model that can identify
new or reemerging vaccine misinformation narratives that are expected to circulate widely and have a
high possibility to effect on vaccine confidence. This project aims to develop the technological
infrastructure required to effectively identify, predict vaccine misinformation narrative, and
quantify the dissemination magnitude of such misinformation in SM. Such a system will support
public health professionals in making informed decisions. At the heart of this infrastructure are NLP
modules that automatically gather and classify vaccine misinformation claims from SM and validate the
claim using the NLP model trained on peer-reviewed public health articles and information from public
health agencies. The specific project aims are:
Aim 1. To establish and evaluate the NLP infrastructure that enables the automatic identification of
vaccine misinformation narrative from SM. The infrastructure started with data collection from SM of
predetermined set keywords that are commonly used to talk about vaccines. We use such a large social
media dataset to develop /evaluate NLP systems that will be based on state of art NLP models such as
transformer models to automatically categorize millions of posts from SM, without requiring labor-
intensive involvement, into containing vaccine misinformation narrative or not. [For example, a tweet
may mention " COVID-19 vaccine contain microchip OR COVID-19 vaccine can change your DNA. the
proposed model outcome will identify such claims.
Aim 2. To establish and evaluate the NLP infrastructure that enables the verification of vaccine
misinformation narrative extracted from aim 1 using language models trained on the knowledge
collected from peer-reviewed scientific articles and information from official public health agencies.
Recent advancements in NLP that include introducing large pre-trained language models showed
promising results in understanding questions and providing an answer in a particular domain. Therefore,
we will build a life-long learning NLP model using a pre-trained language model to accurately classify
whether a claim presented in an SM post is false or true based on current scientific literature.
Aim 3. To build a probabilistic model to quantify the dissemination magnitude of health
misinformation and prioritize the impact of misinformation posts. Using the vaccine misinformation
narratives that are detected as the outcomes of our systems in Aim 2, we will build a model to quantify
the dissemination magnitude of such narratives by estimating the potential post interactions and network
analysis of the users who posted it. the model will predict the virality of vaccine misinformation
narratives and rank them according to potential dissemination power and therefore prioritize the highly
identified influential posts to debunk in real time.
References
1. Swire-Thompson B, Lazer D. Public health and online misinformation: challenges and
recommendations. Annual Review of Public Health. 2019;41:433-51.
2. Poland GA, Jacobson RM. Understanding those who do not understand: a brief review of the
anti-vaccine movement. Vaccine. 2001;19(17-19):2440-5.
3. Suarez-Lledo V, Alvarez-Galvez J. Prevalence of health misinformation on social media: a
systematic review. Journal of medical Internet research. 2021;23(1):e17187.
4. Stokes DC, Andy A, Guntuku SC, Ungar LH, Merchant RM. Public priorities and concerns
regarding COVID-19 in an online discussion forum: longitudinal topic modeling. Journal of general
internal medicine. 2020;35(7):2244-7.
5. Southwell BG, Niederdeppe J, Cappella JN, Gaysynsky A, Kelley DE, Oh A, et al.
Misinformation as a misunderstood challenge to public health. American journal of preventive medicine.
2019;57(2):282-5.
6. de Oliveira NR, Pisa PS, Lopez MA, de Medeiros DSV, Mattos DM. Identifying Fake News on
Social Networks Based on Natural Language Processing: Trends and Challenges. Information.
2021;12(1):38.