  With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, people turned to social media to
read and to share timely information including statistics, warnings, advice,
and inspirational stories. Unfortunately, alongside all this useful
information, there was also a new blending of medical and political
misinformation and disinformation, which gave rise to the first global
infodemic. While fighting this infodemic is typically thought of in terms of
factuality, the problem is much broader as malicious content includes not only
fake news, rumors, and conspiracy theories, but also promotion of fake cures,
panic, racism, xenophobia, and mistrust in the authorities, among others. This
is a complex problem that needs a holistic approach combining the perspectives
of journalists, fact-checkers, policymakers, government entities, social media
platforms, and society as a whole. Taking them into account we define an
annotation schema and detailed annotation instructions, which reflect these
perspectives. We performed initial annotations using this schema, and our
initial experiments demonstrated sizable improvements over the baselines. Now,
we issue a call to arms to the research community and beyond to join the fight
by supporting our crowdsourcing annotation efforts.
