This study looked at 225 pieces of misinformation. These pieces were rated false or misleading by international fact-checking organizations.

To collect data for the fact-checks, they sampled from 2871 articles provided by First Draft News. First Draft News consolidates fact-checks related to COVID-19 using the Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and Google's Fact Check Explorer tool. This was taken from January to March of 2020. They took a random sample of 18% of the articles after excluding all the non-English ones, and secondary sample of 20%. They then replaced all of the duplicates and rated "true" articles in the first sample with articles in the second sample.