Towards Detecting Cascades of Biased Medical Claims on Twitter

Abstract

Social media may disseminate medical claims that highlight misleading correlations between social identifiers and diseases due to not accounting for structural determinants of health. Our research aims to identify biased medical claims on Twitter and measure their spread. We propose a machine learning framework that uses two models in tandem: RoBERTa to detect medical claims and DistilBERT to classify bias. After identifying original biased medical claims, we conducted a retweet cascade analysis, computing their individual reach and rate of spread. Tweets containing biased claims were found to circulate faster and further than unbiased claims.