An Exploratory Analysis on the Unfold of Fake News During COVID-19 Pandemic

Gupta, A.; Bansal, A.; Mamgain, K.

In this era of digitalization, there has been a surge in the spread of news as well as fake news. The main reason for this is the rise in the use of social media and with this advantage, it has opened an opportunity for people to spread fake news intentionally especially in situations like that of the COVID-19 pandemic. Apart from this, it becomes important to note that the spread of such news, be it through offline or online medium, poses an additional threat to societies worldwide further leading people to an empty borewell. In this study, we have looked upon various news across the world, after classifying them into three major categories and those in the top trending count have been mentioned. The datasets have been extracted from Twitter based on keywords provided by the Web crawler. Further, analysis based on the visualizations of the datasets has been illustrated through the histograms and the word clouds during the period of COVID-19 pandemic which shows how this spread of related news was at its peak. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.