CovidCheckBot

Health Education
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CovidCheckBot is a service that allows you to report questionable information concerning the COVID-19 for fact-checking. It supports checking of stats. This bot is available on Twitter and Telegram.

Philip Okugbe

Inspiration

With the COVID-19 global spread, social media has been a huge source of misinformation. People do not think twice or care to make further research before sharing copy-pasted misformation across their contacts. This has caused a lot of harm in the fight to defeat the virus.

What it does

This service allows people to report questionable information concerning the COVID-19 pandemic for fack-checking via Twitter and Telegram. When a user reports a piece of questionable information, we go as far as making further research to confirm or debunk the info. After a complete research, we give a reply back with our findings. Users are discouraged from sharing the questionable information until our research is complete.

Users can also check for the latest statistics of the Coronavirus across all affected countries, with recommendations on where to get verified information.

How I built it

I built it using the Twitter and Telegram API. Java Spring framework was used to handle our internal API for webhook consumption.

Challenges I ran into

The Twitter Account Activity API that handles message webhook events is quite unstable. This has made the bot to miss out on some messages.

What's next for CovidCheckBot

  1. Creating a dashboard view reports and easily assign cases to fact-checkers.
  2. I look forward to making improvements and supporting more platforms.
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A project from #BuildforCOVID19

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