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Record W4405624179 · doi:10.29173/hsi425

A Bestiary of COVID Conspiracies

2021· article· en· W4405624179 on OpenAlex
Aleksandar Vujin, Kevin Dick

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueHealth Science Inquiry · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMisinformation and Its Impacts
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)PandemicPublic healthPopulationTrojan horsePublic relationsOrder (exchange)DiseasePolitical scienceInternet privacyMedicineComputer scienceEnvironmental healthBusinessComputer securityInfectious disease (medical specialty)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

An infodemic of false information and conspiracy theories has followed closely in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbating the public health disaster. In order to curb their spread and counter their effects, conspiratorial beliefs must be catalogued and understood. Drawing on examples from social media video and audio sharing platforms, we provide a non-exhaustive list of conspiratorial beliefs related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and categorize them into three groups: A) beliefs concerning the motivation of the conspirators, including bringing down a rival nation-state, bringing about planetary depopulation, and/or imposing global tyranny; B) beliefs concerning the nature of the COVID-19 disease, including that the disease is made-up, that its impact is exaggerated, that it is caused by a bioengineered virus, and/or that it is caused by a non-viral agent; and C) beliefs concerning the public health response, including that masks and vaccines are harmful to health, and/or that vaccination is an insidious way to track and control the population. We conclude by reflecting on the necessity of tracking and understanding the continuously evolving epistemic ecosystem of pandemic-related conspiracist beliefs in order to implement effective strategies to “quarantine” harmful conspiracy theories and “vaccinate” individuals against conspiracism.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.383
Threshold uncertainty score0.995

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.186
GPT teacher head0.480
Teacher spread0.294 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it