How would you combat misinformation in the newsfeed on COVID-19?

To start with I would take few assumptions:

1. News feed here refers to news on Facebook feeds

2. We are just limiting yourself  to covid news

3. Mis-information here means any information which hasn't been confirmed by authorities till yet.

By taking these assumptions into consideration let's move on to analysing types of mis-information which floats in mews feeds related to covid 19. Broadly we can divide covid related news in following ways:

1. Covid news related to a person or an area or locality.

2. Government and other institutional guidelines

3. Remedies and treatment related news

4. Covid Stats

Out of the following , I would like to prioritise on the basis of number of instances of fake news of each category. According to my personal experience in India, the first category that is mis information related to covid case detection is the most prominent one. People spread rumour and within few hours entire city knows about it. I would like to propose solutions related to the same. Few of the solutions that I would like to propose are:

1. Tie-up with authorities : to provide live covid results data that would consist of patient name, address, age, gender, date of detection. We can use NLP to detect any such instance of news which is related to particular person or area andatch with our API data to show reliability. In case the news doesn't match with api data we can show news as not verified. Biggest challenge here is to bring authorities to share live data.

2. Peer review of the news: Whenever a news targeting any person or area is floated people can report exactness of the data by reporting. Fake news could be shown as not reliable.

3. Starting FB covid news feed where FB posts news taken from reliable  sources. Tie-up with local media houses , authorities could help them create news actively.

 

Out of the three I would prefer moving forward with first option where I tie up with institutions to share real time data as it would be the most reliable source of news. There are many public databases present who are providing live covid stats along with some basic details about the case which includes name, area, gender , age, etc.