# The Coronavirus is a Bioweapon: Analysing Coronavirus Fact-Checked Stories

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01215 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01215/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has heightened the need to flag coronavirus-related misinformation, and fact-checking groups have taken to verifying misinformation on the Internet. We explore stories reported by fact-checking groups PolitiFact, Poynter and Snopes from January to June 2020, characterising them into six story clusters before then analyse time-series and story validity trends and the level of agreement across sites. We further break down the story clusters into more granular story types by proposing a unique automated method with a BERT classifier, which can be used to classify diverse story sources, in both fact-checked stories and tweets.