The worldwide spread of COVID-19 has prompted extensive online discussions, creating an `infodemic' on social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Twitter. However, the information shared on these platforms is prone to be unreliable and/or misleading. In this paper, we present the first analysis of COVID-19 discourse on public WhatsApp groups from Pakistan. Building on a large scale annotation of thousands of messages containing text and images, we identify the main categories of discussion. We focus on COVID-19 messages and understand the different types of images/text messages being propagated. By exploring user behavior related to COVID messages, we inspect how misinformation is spread. Finally, by quantifying the flow of information across WhatsApp and Twitter, we show how information spreads across platforms and how WhatsApp acts as a source for much of the information shared on Twitter.

中文翻译：

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巴基斯坦 WhatsApp 上的 COVID-19 消息初看

COVID-19 的全球传播引发了广泛的在线讨论，在 WhatsApp 和 Twitter 等社交媒体平台上造成了“信息流行病”。但是，在这些平台上共享的信息容易不可靠和/或具有误导性。在本文中，我们对来自巴基斯坦的公共 WhatsApp 群组的 COVID-19 话语进行了首次分析。基于包含文本和图像的数千条消息的大规模注释，我们确定了讨论的主要类别。我们专注于 COVID-19 消息并了解正在传播的不同类型的图像/文本消息。通过探索与 COVID 消息相关的用户行为，我们检查错误信息是如何传播的。最后，通过量化 WhatsApp 和 Twitter 上的信息流，