In the middle of a global health emergency, Americans are now facing “a pandemic of misinformation,” the United Nations secretary-general warned. Misinformation is disseminated especially widely and quickly on Twitter and Facebook through articles on websites that are visited by millions of people every day.
The project aims to aggregate and categorize COVID-19 misinformation into different categories including the area of misinformation as well as the website and social media accounts that amplify them.
Data used for the visualizations on this page is from NewsGuard, a center focused on combating misinformation founded by veteran journalists and news entrepreneurs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz. Crovitz was publisher of The Wall Street Journal and a columnist for the paper. Brill is a lawyer and journalist who founded The American Lawyer, Court TV, and the Yale Journalism Initiative. NewsGuard provides COVID-19 Misinformation Resources including a list of top COVID-19 myths and how they emerged, a daily updated COVID-19 Misinformation Tracking Center and lists of misinformation superspreaders on Twitter and Facebook.
Project by Ha Ta, Northeastern University, 2020.
