  The paper presents the outcomes of AI-COVID19, our project aimed at better
understanding of misinformation flow about COVID-19 across social media
platforms. The specific focus of the study reported in this paper is on
collecting data from Telegram groups which are active in promotion of
COVID-related misinformation. Our corpus collected so far contains around 28
million words, from almost one million messages. Given that a substantial
portion of misinformation flow in social media is spread via multimodal means,
such as images and video, we have also developed a mechanism for utilising such
channels via producing automatic transcripts for videos and automatic
classification for images into such categories as memes, screenshots of posts
and other kinds of images. The accuracy of the image classification pipeline is
around 87%.
