Modeling and Moderation of COVID-19 Social Network Chat
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Negative social media usage during the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of understanding the spread of misinformation and toxicity in public online discussions. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised method to discover the structure of online COVID-19-related conversations. Our method trains a nine-state Hidden Markov Model (HMM) initialized from a biclustering of 23 features extracted from online messages. We apply our method to 16,000 conversations (1.5 million messages) that took place on the Facebook pages of 15 Canadian newspapers following COVID-19 news items, and show that it can effectively extract the conversation structure and discover the main themes of the messages. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the PageRank algorithm and the conversation graph discovered can be used to simulate the impact of five different moderation strategies, which makes it possible to easily develop and test new strategies to limit the spread of harmful messages. Although our work in this paper focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic, the methodology is general enough to be applied to handle communications during future pandemics and other crises, or to develop better practices for online community moderation in general.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".