john-winnicki/Africa-Vaccine-Disinfo-Comparison

Author: Edward Tian, John Winnicki Date: 02/14/2021 Stanford TreeHacks Hackathon devpost.com Vaccine Sentiment Across Africa Misinformation is increasing the spread and damage of COVID-19. We built a platform to monitor misinformation, analyzing over 100,000+ scraped news headlines and search trends focusing on Africa. Inspiration The World Health Organization has just launched the Africa Infodemic Response Alliance — a collaboration with multiple fact checking agencies across Africa responding to the anti-vax and Covid-19 disinformation across Africa. Last month, I spoke with Hisham Mohamed, the head of the AIRA, who stressed the importance of combating disinformation in Africa, with an increasing number of anti-vax sentiment, and the continent posed as a unique proxy between Chinese, Russia, American, and European actors. In this spirit, the purpose of our project is to limit the spread of harmful health disinformation in Africa through providing a coordinated platform for analyzing disinformation across African countries, and preventing disinformation, and a timely and strategic response. What it does Our project consists of two parts: data generation with sentiment analysis; and the geospatial visualization of the data on a map of Africa. The data generation section of the project generates multiple datasets given a list of countries, companies, and time periods: company-specific data of headlines for each country, summary data of a company (including average public sentiment) for each country, and summary data of the most popular company in each country. The data visualization on the “vaccine monitoring” page generates a map of Africa. When hovering over the country a flash card appears on the right with information on the country, and our analyzed sentiment score of the vaccine reception in the country for Pfizer, Sputnik V, Sinovac, and AstraZeneca. The data visualizations on the “conspiracy narratives” di …