A Factual Content Analysis of Facebook Infodemic in Algeria.

This paper identifies shared contents related to COVID-19 by Algerian Facebook users and aims to categorize them according to their level of truthfulness and harm. In addition, the paper reveals how the content and linguistic features contribute to the verification of the shared information’s (dis)factuality and (in)validity. A corpus of Facebook infodemic in Algeria (CoFIA) is compiled for the analysis. First, a factual analysis is conducted for the purpose of infodemic categorization into mis-, dis-, and mal-information. Second, a qualitative content analysis is used to highlight the harm of the information type by discussing major linguistic features found in those categories of information. Online fact-checking tools supported the confirmation of information disorders. Misinformation found in CoFIA was 46.77 %, disinformation was 36.22 %, and mal-information was 22 %. Besides, the content and linguistic aspects of the posts contributed to a considerable extent to the verification of the information type and the actors’ intentions to mislead and/or harm. Algerian Facebook users and even official pages did not recognize the risks of misinformation with the COVID-19 outbreak. Raising public awareness about the impacts of information on social media was recommended to precede such a health emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]