New collaboration tackles COVID-19 ‘infodemic’ in real time

Damage from the COVID-19 pandemic has been amplified by the accompanying “infodemic” of false and misleading online information. To date, most efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 misinformation have been largely unsuccessful as they retroactively attempt to correct false narratives only after they have extensively spread online. A new collaborative effort between Battelle, the Ohio State University, and Northwestern University, sponsored by a $1 million grant from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), aims to address this problem by assessing the risk of COVID-19 misinformation in near real time.