Employing Neural Language Models and A Bayesian Hierarchical Framework for Classification and Engagement Analysis of Misinformation on Social Media

While social media can be an effective tool for maintaining personal relationships and making global connections, it has become a powerful force in the damaging spread of misinformation, especially during universally difficult and taxing events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we collected a sample of Tweets related to COVID-19 from Twitter accounts of influential political media commentators and news organizations, assigning labels of misinformation, misleading, or legitimate to each Tweet. We constructed a Bayesian hierarchical negative binomial regression model to analyze any associations between Tweet engagement and misleading status while controlling for factors such as political lean, lexical diversity, and Retweet status. We found evidence that engagement had a positive association with misleading status and text readability, as well as a negative association with Retweets. We also employed a DeBERTa neural language classification model to predict the presence of misinformative or misleading content in Tweets, and we experimented with external datasets, multitask fine-tuning, backtranslation, and weighted loss to achieve accuracy of 0.683 and a macro F1-score of 0.593. We then examined DeBERTa explainability through word attributions with integrated gradients and found that tokens with the highest influence on model predictions often possessed connotations or context that was understandably related to the predicted label. The results of this study indicate that misleading status, Retweet status, and linguistic features may hold associations with overall Tweet engagement, and the DeBERTa model represents a potentially useful tool that can examine Tweet text alone without an external knowledge base and determine whether misinformation is present.