Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spread across the globe from the beginning of 2020 and people worldwide have been receiving news about the same from government offices, press conferences and various other media outlets. The COVID-19 Information Watcher Project started in 2020 to collect and organize reliable information sources worldwide. However, it is difficult to automatically identify reliable information sources in foreign countries for several reasons. First, what kind of information sources are reliable heavily depend on each county situation. In some countries people trust their government’s official information but in other countries they do not. Secondly, such reliable information sources often provide information in their local languages. Reliable information sources are not necessarily top-ranked by search engines. Crowdsourcing is a promising way to deal with such a case. However, crowd-sourcing platforms do not cover crowds in all countries. In this study, we report some results of our attempt to collect local information regarding COVID-19 from several countries through multi-hop crowdsourcing, in which we allow crowd workers on a crowdsourcing platform to use other platforms in other countries. We show two case studies, Russia and Afghanistan. Our results show that the multi-hop crowdsourcing is a promising way to collect COVID-19 information from different countries.