Catching Zika Fever: Application of Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning for Tracking Health Misinformation on Twitter

Understand

In February 2016, World Health Organization declared the Zika outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

• With developing evidence it can cause birth defects, and the Summer Olympics coming up in the worst affected country, Brazil, the virus caught fire on social media.
• In this work, use Zika as a case study in building a tool for tracking the misinformation around health concerns on Twitter.
• We collect more than 13 million tweets -- spanning the initial reports in February 2016 and the Summer Olympics -- regarding the Zika outbreak and track rumors outlined by the World Health Organization and Snopes fact checking website.