Abstract
BackgroundThe coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is perhaps the greatest global health challenge of the last century. Accompanying this pandemic is a parallel “infodemic,” including the online marketing and sale of unapproved, illegal, and counterfeit COVID-19 health products including testing kits, treatments, and other questionable “cures.” Enabling the proliferation of this content is the growing ubiquity of internet-based technologies, including popular social media platforms that now have billions of global users.ObjectiveThis study aims to collect, analyze, identify, and enable reporting of suspected fake, counterfeit, and unapproved COVID-19–related health care products from Twitter and Instagram.MethodsThis study is conducted in two phases beginning with the collection of COVID-19–related Twitter and Instagram posts using a combination of web scraping on Instagram and filtering the public streaming Twitter application programming interface for keywords associated with suspect marketing and sale of COVID-19 products. The second phase involved data analysis using natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning to identify potential sellers that were then manually annotated for characteristics of interest. We also visualized illegal selling posts on a customized data dashboard to enable public health intelligence.ResultsWe collected a total of 6,029,323 tweets and 204,597 Instagram posts filtered for terms associated with suspect marketing and sale of COVID-19 health products from March to April for Twitter and February to May for Instagram. After applying our NLP and deep learning approaches, we identified 1271 tweets and 596 Instagram posts associated with questionable sales of COVID-19–related products. Generally, product introduction came in two waves, with the first consisting of questionable immunity-boosting treatments and a second involving suspect testing kits. We also detected a low volume of pharmaceuticals that have not been approved for COVID-19 treatment. Other major themes detected included products offered in different languages, various claims of product credibility, completely unsubstantiated products, unapproved testing modalities, and different payment and seller contact methods.ConclusionsResults from this study provide initial insight into one front of the “infodemic” fight against COVID-19 by characterizing what types of health products, selling claims, and types of sellers were active on two popular social media platforms at earlier stages of the pandemic. This cybercrime challenge is likely to continue as the pandemic progresses and more people seek access to COVID-19 testing and treatment. This data intelligence can help public health agencies, regulatory authorities, legitimate manufacturers, and technology platforms better remove and prevent this content from harming the public.
Highlights
The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV; known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS-Cov-2]) and associated diagnosis, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), has created a global crisis
Results from this study provide initial insight into one front of the “infodemic” fight against COVID-19 by characterizing what types of health products, selling claims, and types of sellers were active on two popular social media platforms at earlier stages of the pandemic
This retrospective big data study was conducted in two phases: (1) data collection using the public streaming Twitter application programming interface (API) and the use of web scraping on Instagram to collect social media posts filtered for COVID-19–related keywords and (2) data analysis using natural language processing (NLP) to isolate topic clusters related to COVID-19 product sales combined with a deep learning algorithm to classify a larger volume of social media posts for classification of “signal” posts
Summary
The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV; known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS-Cov-2]) and associated diagnosis, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), has created a global crisis. With the advent of social media, an information-sharing culture, and technological dispersion throughout the world to access these platforms (ie, mobile, broadband access) the more than 2.9 billion global social media users have more information resources to help them understand and protect themselves against the coronavirus [4]. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is perhaps the greatest global health challenge of the last century. Accompanying this pandemic is a parallel “infodemic,” including the online marketing and sale of unapproved, illegal, and counterfeit COVID-19 health products including testing kits, treatments, and other questionable “cures.” Enabling the proliferation of this content is the growing ubiquity of internet-based technologies, including popular social media platforms that have billions of global users
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