The World Health Organization is collaborating with an analytics company to scan people’s social media conversations for “coronavirus misinformation;” something the WHO calls “social listening.”
The global health organization says that it’s not only fighting the pandemic but also the conversations people are having about it.
According to the WHO, there’s an “infodemic” – an overload and spread of misleading information, so much so that it decided that to tackle misinformation, it needs to employ various tools, including social listening, with machine learning monitoring.
“Countering fake news or rumors is actually only responding or mitigating when it’s too late,” said Tim Nguyen, a technology expert helping the WHO’s unit titled Information Network for Epidemics (EPI-WIN). “What we’ve put in place in the beginning of the pandemic is what we call a social listening approach.”
