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The COVID-19 social media infodemic

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We address the diffusion of information about the COVID-19 with a massive data analysis on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Gab. We analyze engagement and interest in the COVID-19 topic and provide a differential assessment on the evolution of the discourse on a global scale for each platform and their users. We fit information spreading with epidemic models characterizing the basic reproduction number R 0 for each social media platform. Moreover, we identify information spreading from questionable sources, finding different volumes of misinformation in each platform. However, information from both reliable and questionable sources do not present different spreading patterns. Finally, we provide platform-dependent numerical estimates of rumors’ amplification.
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The COVID‑19 social media
infodemic
Matteo Cinelli1,2, Walter Quattrociocchi1,2,3*, Alessandro Galeazzi4, Carlo Michele Valensise5,
Emanuele Brugnoli1, Ana Lucia Schmidt2, Paola Zola6, Fabiana Zollo1,2,7 & Antonio Scala1,3
We address the diusion of information about the COVID‑19 with a massive data analysis on Twitter,
Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Gab. We analyze engagement and interest in the COVID‑19 topic
and provide a dierential assessment on the evolution of the discourse on a global scale for each
platform and their users. We t information spreading with epidemic models characterizing the basic
reproduction number
R0
for each social media platform. Moreover, we identify information spreading
from questionable sources, nding dierent volumes of misinformation in each platform. However,
information from both reliable and questionable sources do not present dierent spreading patterns.
Finally, we provide platform‑dependent numerical estimates of rumors’ amplication.
e World Health Organization (WHO) dened the SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak as a severe global threat1. As
foreseen in 2017 by the global risk report of the World Economic forum, global risks are interconnected. In
particular, the case of the COVID-19 epidemic (the infectious disease caused by the most recently discovered
human coronavirus) is showing the critical role of information diusion in a disintermediated news cycle2.
e term infodemic3,4 has been coined to outline the perils of misinformation phenomena during the man-
agement of disease outbreaks57, since it could even speed up the epidemic process by inuencing and frag-
menting social response8. As an example, CNN has recently anticipated a rumor about the possible lock-down
of Lombardy (a region in northern Italy) to prevent pandemics9, publishing the news hours before the ocial
communication from the Italian Prime Minister. As a result, people overcrowded trains and airports to escape
from Lombardy toward the southern regions before the lock-down was put in place, disrupting the government
initiative aimed to contain the epidemics and potentially increasing contagion. us, an important research
challenge is to determine how people seek or avoid information and how those decisions aect their behavior10,
particularly when the news cycle—dominated by the disintermediated diusion of information—alters the way
information is consumed and reported on.
e case of the COVID-19 epidemic shows the critical impact of this new information environment. e
information spreading can strongly inuence people’s behavior and alter the eectiveness of the countermeas-
ures deployed by governments. To this respect, models to forecast virus spreading are starting to account for
the behavioral response of the population with respect to public health interventions and the communication
dynamics behind content consumption8,11,12.
Social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter provide direct access to an unprecedented amount of
content and may amplify rumors and questionable information. Taking into account users’ preferences and atti-
tudes, algorithms mediate and facilitate content promotion and thus information spreading13. is shi from the
traditional news paradigm profoundly impacts the construction of social perceptions14 and the framing of narra-
tives; it inuences policy-making, political communication, as well as the evolution of public debate15,16, especially
when issues are controversial17. Users online tend to acquire information adhering to their worldviews18,19, to
ignore dissenting information20,21 and to form polarized groups around shared narratives22,23. Furthermore, when
polarization is high, misinformation might easily proliferate24,25. Some studies pointed out that fake news and
inaccurate information may spread faster and wider than fact-based news26. However, this might be platform-
specic eect. e denition of “Fake News” may indeed be inadequate since political debate oen resorts
to labelling opposite news as unreliable or fake27. Studying the eect of the social media environment on the
perception of polarizing topics is being addressed also in the case of COVID-19. e issues related to the cur-
rent infodemics are indeed being tackled by the scientic literature from multiple perspectives including the
open
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dynamics of hatespeech and conspiracy theories28,29, the eect of bots and automated accounts30, and the threats
of misinformation in terms of diusion and opinions formation31,32.
In this work we provide an in-depth analysis of the social dynamics in a time window where narratives and
moods in social media related to the COVID-19 have emerged and spread. While most of the studies on misin-
formation diusion focus on a single platform17,26,33, the dynamics behind information consumption might be
particular to the environment in which they spread on. Consequently, in this paper we perform a comparative
analysis on ve social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Gab) during the COVID-19
outbreak. e dataset includes more than 8 million comments and posts over a time span of 45 days. We analyze
user engagement and interest about the COVID-19 topic, providing an assessment of the discourse evolution
over time on a global scale for each platform. Furthermore, we model the spread of information with epidemic
models, characterizing for each platform its basic reproduction number (
R0
), i.e. the average number of second-
ary cases (users that start posting about COVID-19) an “infectious” individual (an individual already posting
on COVID-19) will create. In epidemiology,
R0
=1 is a threshold parameter. When
R0<1
the disease will die
out in a nite period of time, while the disease will spread for
R0>1
. In social media,
R0>1
will indicate the
possibility of an infodemic.
Finally, coherently with the classication provided by the fact-checking organization Media Bias/Fact Check34
that classies news sources based on the truthfulness and bias of the information published, we split news outlets
into two groups. ese groups are either associated to the diusion of (mostly) reliable or (mostly) questionable
contents and we characterize the spreading of information regarding COVID-19 relying on this classication.
We nd that users in mainstream platforms are less susceptible to the diusion of information from question-
able sources and that information deriving from news outlets marked either as reliable or questionable do not
present signicant dierence in the way it spreads.
Our ndings suggest that the interaction patterns of each social media combined with the peculiarity of the
audience of each platform play a pivotal role in information and misinformation spreading. We conclude the
paper by measuring rumor’s amplication parameters for COVID-19 on each social media platform.
Results
We analyze mainstream platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and YouTube as well as less regulated social media
platforms such as Gab and Reddit. Gab is a crowdfunded social media whose structure and features are Twitter-
inspired. It performs very little control on content posted; in the political spectrum, its user base is considered
to be far-right. Reddit is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website based
on collective ltering of information.
We perform a comparative analysis of information spreading dynamics around the same argument in dier-
ent environments having dierent interaction settings and audiences. We collect all pieces of content related to
COVID-19 from the 1st of January to the 14th of February. Data have been collected ltering contents accord-
ingly to a selected sample of Google Trends’ COVID-19 related queries such as: coronavirus, coronavirusout-
break, imnotavirus, ncov, ncov-19, pandemic, wuhan. e deriving dataset is then composed of 1,342,103 posts
and 7,465,721 comments produced by 3,734,815 users. For more details regarding the data collection refer to
Methods.
Interaction patterns. First, we analyze the interactions (i.e., the engagement) that users have with COVID-
19 topics on each platform. e upper panel of Fig.1 shows users’ engagement around the COVID-19 topic.
Despite the dierences among platforms, we observe that they all display a rather similar distribution of the
users’ activity characterized by a long tail. is entails that users behave similarly for what concern the dynamics
of reactions and content consumption. Indeed, users’ interactions with the COVID-19 content present attention
patterns similar to any other topic35. e highest volume of interactions in terms of posting and commenting can
be observed on mainstream platforms such as YouTube and Twitter.
en, to provide an overview of the debate concerning the disease outbreak, we extract and analyze the topics
related to the COVID-19 content by means of Natural Language Processing techniques. We build word embed-
ding for the text corpus of each platform, i.e. a word vector representation in which words sharing common
contexts are in close proximity. Moreover, by running clustering procedures on these vector representations, we
separate groups of words and topics that are perceived as more relevant for the COVID-19 debate. For further
details refer to Methods. e results (Fig.1, middle panel) show that topics are quite similar across each social
media platform. Debates range from comparisons to other viruses, requests for God blessing, up to racism, while
the largest volume of interaction is related to the lock-down of ights.
Finally, to characterize user engagement with the COVID-19 on the ve platforms, we compute the cumulative
number of new posts each day (Fig.1, lower panel). For all platforms, we nd a change of behavior around the
20th of January, that is the day that the World Health Organization (WHO) issued its rst situation report on the
COVID-1936. e largest increase in the number of posts is on the 21st of January for Gab, the 24th January for
Reddit, the 30th January for Twitter, the 31th January for YouTube and the 5th of February for Instagram. us,
social media platforms seem to have specic timings for content consumption; such patterns may depend upon
the dierence in terms of audience and interaction mechanisms (both social and algorithmic) among platforms.
Information spreading. Eorts to simulate the spreading of information on social media by reproducing
real data have mostly applied variants of standard epidemic models3740. Coherently, we analyze the observed
monotonic increasing trend in the way new users interact with information related to the COVID-19 by using
epidemic models. Unlike previous works, we do not only focus on models that imply specic growth mecha-
nisms, but also on phenomenological models that emphasize the reproducibility of empirical data41.
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Most of the epidemiological models focus on the basic reproduction number
R0
, representing the expected
number of new infectors directly generated by an infected individual for a given time period42. An epidemic
occurs if
R0>1
,—i.e., if an exponential growth in the number of infections is expected at least in the initial
phase. In our case, we try to model the growth in number of people publishing a post on a subject as an infec-
tive process, where people can start publishing aer being exposed to the topic. While in real epidemics
R0>1
highlights the possibility of a pandemic, in our approach
R0>1
indicates the emergence of an infodemic. We
model the dynamics both with the phenomenological model of43 (from now on referred to as the EXP model)
and with the standard SIR (Susceptible, Infected, Recovered) compartmental model44. Further details on the
modeling approach can be found in Methods.
As shown in Fig.2, each platform has its own basic reproduction number
R0
. As expected, all the values of
R0
are supercritical—even considering condence intervals (Table1)—signaling the possibility of an infodemic. is
observation may facilitate the prediction task of information spreading during critical events. Indeed, according
to this result we can consider information spreading patterns on each social media to predict social response
when implementing crisis management plans.
While
R0
is a good proxy for the engagement rate and a good predictor for epidemic-like information spread-
ing, social contagion phenomena might be in general more complex4547. For instance, in the case of Instagram,
we observe an abrupt jump in the number of new users that cannot be explained with continuous models like
the standard epidemic ones; accordingly, the SIR model estimates a value of
R0102
that is way beyond what
has been observed in any real-world epidemic.
Figure1. Upper panel: activity (likes, comments, reposts, etc.) distribution for each social media. Middle panel:
most discussed topics about COVID-19 on each social media. Lower panel: cumulative number of content
(posts, tweets, videos, etc.) produced from the 1st of January to the 14th of February. Due to the Twitter API
limitations in gathering past data, the rst data point for Twitter is dated January 27th.
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Questionable VS reliable information sources. We conclude our analysis by comparing the diusion
of information from questionable and reliable sources on each platform. We tag links as reliable or question-
able according to the data reported by the independent fact-checking organization Media Bias/Fact Check34. In
order to clarify the limits of an approach that is based on labelling news outlets rather than single articles, as for
instance performed in33,48, we report the denitions used in this paper for questionable and reliable information
sources. In accordance with the criteria established by MBFC, by questionable information source we mean a
news outlet systematically showing one or more of the following characteristics: extreme bias, consistent promo-
tion of propaganda/conspiracies, poor or no sourcing to credible information, information not supported by
evidence or unveriable, a complete lack of transparency and/or fake news. By reliable information sources we
mean news outlets that do not show any of the aforementioned characteristics. Such outlets can anyway produce
contents potentially displaying a bias towards liberal/conservative opinion, but this does not compromise the
overall reliability of the source.
Figure3 shows, for each platform, the plots of the cumulative number of posts and reactions related to reliable
sources versus the cumulative number of posts and interactions referring to questionable sources. By interactions
we mean the overall reactions, e.g. likes or other form or endorsement and comments, that can be performed
with respect to a post on a social platform. Surprisingly, all the posts show a strong linear correlation, i.e., the
number of posts/reactions relying on questionable and reliable sources grows with the same pace inside the same
social media platform. We observe the same phenomenon also for the engagement with reliable and questionable
sources. Hence, the growth dynamics of posts/interactions related to questionable news outlets is just a re-scaled
version of the growth dynamics of posts/reactions related to reliable news outlets; however, the re-scaling factor
ρ
(i.e., the fraction of questionable over reliable) is strongly dependent on the platform.
In particular, we observe that in mainstream social media the number of posts produced by questionable
sources represents a small fraction of posts produced by reliable ones; the same thing happens in Reddit. Among
less regulated social media, a peculiar eect is observed in Gab: while the volume of posts from questionable
sources is just the
of the volume of posts from reliable ones, the volume of reactions for the former ones
is
3
times bigger than the volume for the latter ones. Such results hint the possibility that dierent platform
react dierently to information produced by reliable and questionable news outlets.
To further investigate this issue, we dene the amplication factor
E
as the average number of reactions to a
post; hence,
E
is a measure that quanties the extent to which a post is amplied in a social media. We observe
that the amplication
EU
(for unreliable posts posts produced by questionable outlets) and
ER
(for reliable posts
Figure2. Growth of the number of authors versus time. Time is expressed in number of days since 1st January
2020 (day 1). Shaded areas represents [5%, 95%] estimates of the models obtained via bootstrapping least square
estimates of the EXP model (upper panels) and of the SIR model (lower panels). For details the SIR and the EXP
model, see SI.
Table 1. [5%, 95%] interval of condence
R0
as estimated from bootstrapping the least square ts parameter
of the EXP and of the SIR model. Notice that, due to the steepness of the growth of the number of new authors
in Instagram,
R0
assumes unrealistic values
102
for the SIR model.
Gab Reddit YouTu b e Instagram Twitter
REXP
0
[1.42, 1.52] [1.44, 1.51] [1.56, 1.70] [2.02, 2.64] [1.65, 2.06]
RSIR
0
[2.2, 2.5] [2.4, 2.8] [3.2, 3.5]
[1.1 ×102, 1.6 ×102]
[4.0, 5.1]
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posts produced by reliable outlets) vary from social media platform to social media platform and that assumes
the largest values in YouTube and the lowest in Gab. To measure the permeability of a platform to posts from
questionable/reliable news outlets, we then dene the coecient of relative amplication
α
=E
U/
E
R
. It is a
measure of whether a social media amplies questionable (
α>1
) or reliable (
α<1
) posts. Results are shown in
Table2. Among mainstream social media, we notice that Twitter is the most neutral (
α1
i.e.
EUER
), w hile
YouTube amplies questionable sources less (
α4/10
). Among less popular social media, Reddit reduces the
impact of questionable sources (
α1/2
), while Gab strongly amplies them (
α4
).
erefore, we conclude that the main drivers of information spreading are related to specic peculiarities of
each platform and depends upon the group dynamics of individuals engaged with the topic.
Figure3. Upper panels: plot of the cumulative number of posts referring to questionable sources versus
the cumulative number of posts referring to reliable sources. Lower panel: plot of the cumulative number
of engagements relatives to questionable sources versus the cumulative number of engagements relative
to reliable sources. Notice that a linear behavior indicates that the time evolution of questionable posts/
engagements is just a re-scaled version of the time evolution of reliable posts/engagements. Each plot indicates
the regression coecients
ρ
, representing the ratio among the volumes of questionable and reliable posts (
ρpost
)
and engagements (
ρeng
). In more popular social media, the number of questionable posts represents a small
fraction of the reliable ones; same thing happens in Reddit. Among less popular social media, a peculiar eect
is observed in Gab: while the volume of questionable posts is just the
70%
of the volume of reliable ones, the
volume of engagements for questionable posts is
3
times bigger than the volume for reliable ones. Further
details concerning the regression coecients are reported in Methods.
Table 2. e average engagement of a post is the number of reactions expected for a post and is a measure of
how much a post is amplied in each social media platform. e average engagement
EU
(for unreliable post)
and
ER
(for reliable post) vary from platform to platform, and are the largest in Twitter and the lowest in Gab.
e coecient of relative amplication
α
=E
U/
E
R
measures whether a social media amplies more unreliable
(
α>1
) or reliable (
α<1
) posts. Among more popular social media platforms, we notice that Twitter is the
most neutral (
α1%
i.e.
EUER
), while YouTube amplies unreliable sources less (
α
4/10
). Among less
popular social media platforms, Reddit reduces the impact of unreliable sources (
α
1/2
) while Gab strongly
amplies them (
α4
).
EU
ER
α
Gab 5.6 1.4 3.9
Reddit 22.7 40.1 0.55
Twitter 15.1 15.6 0.97
YouTub e
1.4 ×104
3.9 ×104
0.35
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Conclusions
In this work we perform a comparative analysis of users’ activity on ve dierent social media platforms during
the COVID-19 health emergency. Such a timeframe is a good benchmark for studying content consumption
dynamics around critical events in a times when the accuracy of information is threatened. We assess user
engagement and interest about the COVID-19 topic and characterize the evolution of the discourse over time.
Furthermore, we model the spread of information using epidemic models and provide basic growth param-
eters for each social media platform. We then analyze the diusion of questionable information for all channels,
nding that Gab is the environment more susceptible to misinformation dissemination. However, information
deriving from sources marked either as reliable or questionable do not present signicant dierences in their
its spreading patterns. Our analysis suggests that information spreading is driven by the interaction paradigm
imposed by the specic social media or/and by the specic interaction patterns of groups of users engaged with
the topic. We conclude the paper by computing rumor’s amplication parameters for social media platforms.
We believe that the understanding of social dynamics between content consumption and social media plat-
forms is an important research subject, since it may help to design more ecient epidemic models accounting
for social behavior and to design more eective and tailored communication strategies in time of crisis.
Methods
Data collection. Table3 reports the data breakdown of the ve social media platforms. Dierent data col-
lection processes have been performed depending on the platform. In all cases we guided the data collection by
a set of selected keywords based on Google Trends’ COVID-19 related queries such as: coronavirus, pandemic,
coronaoutbreak, china, wuhan, nCoV, IamNotAVirus, coronavirus_update, coronavirus_transmission, corona-
virusnews, coronavirusoutbreak.
e Reddit dataset was downloaded from the Pushi .io archive, exploiting the related API. In order to lter
contents linked to COVID-19, we used our set of keywords.
In Gab, although no ocial guides are available, there is an API service that given a certain keyword, returns
a list of users, hashtags and groups related to it. We queried all the keywords we selected based on Google
Trends and we downloaded all hashtags linked to them. We then manually browsed the results and selected a
set of hashtags based on their meaning. For each hashtag in our list, we downloaded all the posts and comments
linked to it.
For YouTube, we collected videos by using the YouTube Data API by searching for videos that matched our
keywords. en an in depth search was done by crawling the network of videos by searching for more related
videos as established by the YouTube algorithm. From the gathered set, we ltered the videos that matched
coronavirus, nCov, corona virus, corona-virus, corvid, covid or SARS-CoV in the title or description. We then
collected all the comments received by those videos.
For Twitter, we collect tweets related to the topic coronavirus by using both the search and stream endpoint
of the Twitter API. e data derived from the stream API represent only 1% of the total volume of tweets, further
ltered by the selected keywords. e data derived from the search API represent a random sample of the tweets
containing the selected keywords up to a maximum rate limit of 18000 tweets every 10 minutes.
Since no ocial API are available for Instagram data, we built our own process to collect public contents
related to our keywords. We manually took notes of posts, comments and populated the Instagram Dataset.
Matching ability. We consider all the posts in our dataset that contain at least one URL linking to a website
outside the related social media platfrom (e.g., tweets pointing outside Twitter). We separate URLs in two main
categories obtained using the classication provided by MediaBias/FactCheck (MBFC). MBFC provides a clas-
sication determined by ranking bias in four dierent categories, one of them being Factual/Sourcing. In that
category, each news outlet is associated to a label that refers to its reliability as expressed in three labels, namely
Conspiracy-Pseudoscience, Pro-Science or Questionable. Noticeably, also the Questionable set include a wide
range of political bias, from Extreme Le to Extreme Right.
Using such a classication, we assign to each of these outlets a binary label that partially stems from the
labelling provided by MBFC. We divide the news outlets into Questionable and Reliable. All the outlets already
classied as Questionable or belonging to the category Conspiracy-Pseudoscience are labelled as Questionable,
the rest is labelled as Reliable. us, by questionable information source we mean a news outlet systematically
showing one or more of the following characteristics: extreme bias, consistent promotion of propaganda/con-
spiracies, poor or no sourcing to credible information, information not supported by evidence or unveriable, a
Table 3. Data breakdown of the number of posts, comments and users for all platforms.
Posts Comments Users Period
Gab 6,252 4,364 2,629 01/01–14/02
Reddit 10,084 300,751 89,456 01/01–14/02
YouTub e 111,709 7,051,595 3,199,525 01/01–14/02
Instagram 26,576 109,011 52,339 01/01–14/02
Twitter 1,187,482 – 390,866 27/01–14/02
Tot a l 1,342,103 7,465,721 3,734,815
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complete lack of transparency and/or fake news. By reliable information sources we mean news outlets that do not
show any of the aforementioned characteristics. Such outlets can anyway produce contents potentially displaying
a bias towards liberal/conservative opinion, but this does not compromise the overall reliability of the source.
Considering all the 2637 news outlets that we retrieve from the list provided by MBFC we end up with 800
outlets classied as Questionable 1837 outlets classied as Reliable. Using such a classication we quantify our
overall ability to match and label domains of posts containing URLs, as reported in Table4.e matching ability
that is low doesn’t refer to the ability of identifying known domain but to the ability of nding the news outlets
that belong to the list provided by MBFC. Indeed in all the social networks we nd a tendency towards linking
to other social media platforms, as shown in Table5.
Text analysis. To provide an overview of the debate concerning the virus outbreak on the various platforms,
we extract and analyze all topics related to COVID-19 by applying Natural Language Processing techniques to
the written content of each social media platform. We rst build word embedding for the text corpus of each
platform, then, to assess the topics around which the perception of the COVID-19 debate is concentrated, we
cluster words by running the Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) algorithm on their vector representations.
Word embeddings, i.e., distributed representations of words learned by neural networks, represent words as
vectors in
Rn
bringing similar words closer to each other. ey perform signicantly better than the well-known
Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for preserving linear regularities among
words and computational eciency on large data sets49. In this paper we use the Skip-gram model50 to construct
word embedding of each social media corpus. More formally, given a content represented by the sequence of
words
w1,w2,...,wT
, we use stochastic gradient descent with gradient computed through backpropagation
rule51 for maximizing the average log probability
where k is the size of the training window. erefore, during training the vector representations of closely related
words are pushed to be close to each other.
In the Skip-gram model, every word w is associated with its input and output vectors,
uw
and
vw
, respect ively.
e probability of correctly predicting the word
wi
given the word
wj
is dened as
where V is the number of words in the corpus vocabulary. Two major parameters aect the training quality: the
dimensionality of word vectors, and the size of the surrounding words window. We choose 200 as vector dimen-
sion—that is typical value for training large dataset—and 6 words for the window.
(1)
1
T
T
t=1
k
j=−k
log p(wt+j|wt)
(2)
p
(wi|wj)=
exp
uT
wivwj
V
l=1
exp
uT
lvwj
Table 4. Number of posts containing a URL, matching ability and classication for each of the ve platforms.
Gab Reddit YouTu b e Instagram Twitter
Posts containing a URL 3,778 10,084 351,786 1,328 356,448
Matched 0.47 0.55 0.035 0.09 0.27
Questionable 0.38 0.045 0.064 0.05 0.10
Reliable 0.62 0.955 0.936 0.95 0.90
Table 5. Fraction of URLs pointing to social media. Table should be read as entries in each row link to entries
in each column. For example, Gab links to Reddit 0.003.
Gab Reddit YouTu b e Instagram Twitter Facebook
Gab 0.003 0.002 0.001 0.002 0.138 0
Reddit 0.043 0.006 0.009 0.001 0 0
YouTub e 00 0.292 0 0.088 0.081
Instagram 0 0 0.003 0 0.001 0.001
Twitter 0.059 0.001 0.257 0.003 0 0
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Before applying the tool, we reduced the contents to those written in English as detected with cld3. en we
cleaned the corpora by removing HTML code, URLs and email addresses, user mentions, hashtags, stop-words,
and all the special characters including digits. Finally, we dropped words composed by less than three characters,
words occurring less than ve times in all the corpus, and contents with less than three words.
To analyze the topics related to COVID-19, we cluster words by PAM and using as proximity metric the cosine
distance matrix of words in their vector representations. In order to select the number of clusters, k, we calculate
the average silhouette width for each value of k. Moreover, for evaluating the cluster stability, we calculate the
average pairwise Jaccard similarity between clusters based on 90% sub-samples of the data. Lastly, we produce
word clouds to identify the topic of each cluster. To provide a view about the debate around the virus outbreak,
we dene the distribution over topics
c
for a given content c as the distribution of its words among the word
clusters. us, to quantify the relevance of each topic within a corpus, we restrict to contents c with
max c>0.5
and consider them uniquely identied as a single topic each. Table6 shows the results of the text cleaning and
topic analysis for all the data.
Epidemiological models. Several mathematical models can be used to analyse potential mechanisms that
underline epidemiological data. Generally, we can distinguish among phenomenological models that emphasize
the reproducibility of empirical data without insights in the mechanisms of growth, and more insightful mecha-
nistic models that try to incorporate such mechanisms41.
To t our cumulative curves, we rst use the adjusted exponential model of43 since it naturally provides an
estimate of the basic reproduction number
R0
. is phenomenological model (from now on indicated as EXP) has
been successfully employed in data-scarce settings and shown to be on-par with more traditional compartmental
models for multiple emerging diseases like Zika, Ebola, and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome43.
e model is dened by the following single equation:
Here, I is incidence, t is the number of days,
R0
is the basic reproduction number and d is a damping factor
accounting for the reduction in transmissibility over time. In our case, we interpret I as the number
Cauth
of
authors that have published a post on the subject.
As a mechanistic model, we employ the classical SIR model44. In such a model, a susceptible population can
be infected with a rate
β
by coming into contact with infected individuals; however, infected individuals can
recover with a rate
γ
. e model is described by a set of dierential equations:
where S is the number of susceptible, I is the number of infected and R is the number of recovered. In our case,
we interpret the number
I+R
as the number
Cauth
of authors that have published a post on the subject.
In the SIR model, the basic reproduction number
R0=β/γ
corresponds to the ration among the rate of
infection by contact
β
and the rate of recovery
γ
. Notice that for the SIR model, vaccination strategies correspond
to bringing the system in a situation where
S<N/R0
; in such a way, both the number of infected will decrease.
To estimate the basic reproduction numbers
REXP
0
and
RSIR
0
for the EXP and the SIR model, we use least square
estimates of the modelsparameters42. e range of parameters is estimated via bootstrapping41,52.
Linear regression coecients. Table7 reports the regression coecient
ρ
, the intercept and the
R2
values
for the linear t of Fig.3. High values of
R2
conrm the linear relationship between reliable and questionable
sources in information diusion.
(3)
I
=
R0
(1+d)
t
t
(4)
t
S=−βS·I/N
tI=βS·I/NγI
tR=γI
Table 6. Results of text cleaning and analysis for all the corpora.
Cleaned contents Vocabulary size Topics Contents with
max �>0.5
Instagram 21,189 posts 15,324 17 4,467
Twitter 638,214 posts 22,587 21 369,131
Gab 5,853 posts 3,024 19 2,986
Reddit 10,084 posts 1,968 34 6,686
YouTub e 815,563 comments 35,381 30 679,261
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Data availability
e datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding
author on reasonable request.
Received: 11 April 2020; Accepted: 15 September 2020
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Author contributions
M.C., A.G., C.M.V., A.L.S., P.Z. collected and prepared the data. All authors conceived the experiments. M.C.,
A.G., C.M.V., A.L.S., E.B., and A.S. conducted the experiments. All authors analysed the results, wrote and
reviewed the manuscript.
Competing interests
e authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to W.Q.
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... Misinformation about the virus's spread, treatments, and vaccines often emerged from misunderstanding or fear. Disinformation campaigns, in contrast, deliberately sought to undermine public trust in health authorities, promote unverified treatments, or manipulate political narratives [11,56]. These campaigns were designed not only to mislead but also to fracture public consensus and weaken institutional responses. ...
... During critical events, such as elections or global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, coordinated efforts to spread disinformation can have significant impacts on public discourse and decision making [58]. For instance, disinformation campaigns during the pandemic used bots to spread misleading content about the origins of the virus, vaccine safety, and the effectiveness of government responses [56,59]. These dynamics underscore the need for greater oversight of social media algorithms and more robust content moderation practices to mitigate the spread of both misinformation and disinformation. ...
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Definition: The advent of the internet has fundamentally transformed how people access and interact with information. The digital landscape offers easy access to educational materials and healthcare and can support informed decision making. It also presents significant challenges in effectively using this information. This entry discusses the multifaceted barriers that can impede individuals from fully benefiting from the internet's information resources. Key challenges include discerning between accuracy and misinformation, the uneven distribution of digital literacy, disparities in access to technology, and motivational barriers in seeking reliable information. Additionally, the growing involvement of artificial intelligence (AI) in content curation, regulation, and moderation introduces opportunities and ethical dilemmas. These factors complicate efforts to support the accuracy and trustworthiness of the information shared through digital platforms.
... Several studies have documented the increasing reliance on SNSs across various countries amid this global crisis (Cauberghe et al., 2021). With lockdowns and social distancing measures limiting face-to-face interactions, SNSs have become essential for communication and emotional support (Cinelli et al., 2020;Honora et al., 2022). Essentially, SNSs have served as a means for individuals to pass the time, connect with others, and mentally distance themselves from the stress induced by the pandemic. ...
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In response to the evolving e-commerce landscape, the study investigates changing patterns of social networking site (SNS) usage during a pandemic. Grounded in the interaction of the person-affect-cognition-execution model for addictive behaviors and the appraisal and coping theory, it explores the depth and extent of SNS usage. Specifically, the study examines the moderated mediating effect of perceived stress (PS) and fear of missing out, with risk mitigation behavior as a moderator. With data from a nationwide survey in Korea with 760 responses, results show that risk mitigation behavior moderates the relationship between infection threat and PS, while PS and fear of missing out mediate the effect of infection threat on SNS usage. The moderated mediation of PS was significant, shedding light on the complex psychological mechanisms that drive SNS behavior during global crises. The findings deepen understanding of how stress and coping strategies shape SNS engagement in response to crisis.
... Participants recognized that false claims around vaccine efficacy and potential side effects, which they had all seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, were prevalent and had significant public health consequences. Related work on pandemic misinformation demonstrates similar notions of social media's role in spreading COVID-19 misinformation, sometimes termed the "infodemic," which refers to the perils of misinformation during the management of disease outbreaks (Cinelli et al., 2020;Pennycook et al., 2020). The chance for misinformation to influence the way people think about how a viral infection can get transmitted, potential measures for prevention, and how the disease can get treated increased the proliferation of perceptions of safety harm. ...
Article
Digital misinformation is rampant, and understanding how exposure to misinformation affects the perceptions and decision-making processes of adolescents is crucial. In a four-part qualitative study with 25 college students 18–19 years old, we found that participants first assess the severity of harms (e.g., emotion, trust) that misinformation can cause, and then think about the possibilities for reputation harm, discrimination harm, or safety harm for certain kinds of misinformation. Qualities of misinformation including mis-contextualization, deceptive imagery, and impersonation factor into adolescent assessments. From these qualities, we developed a playbook for understanding adolescents’ perceptions of the harms caused by digital misinformation. This playbook can be used by researchers and technologists working to enhance and develop online governance standards by creating digital navigation practices to mitigate misinformation-related harm towards adolescents.
... However, the participants of the study, most of them university students, considered the information transmitted by the Ministry of Health, WHO and television news to be more reliable. Therefore, although social networks are considered efficient tools for the dissemination of information, they are still discredited by the population, due to the large amount of untrue information that is transmitted by them (CINELLI et al., 2020). However, due to the important role of social networks in the propagation of information about COVID-19, it is evident that they should be explored as tools by Higher Education Institutions to promote health education in an efficient and reliable way. ...
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Introduction: Faced with the most serious public health threat of the 21st century, several actions have been suggested worldwide to prevent and control the spread of COVID-19. Objective: To understand which of these actions have been assimilated, here we evaluated the knowledge, perceptions, and practices acquired and/or improved by undergraduate students. Methods: This cross-sectional quantitative study was conducted at a public university in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Data were collected via an online questionnaire distributed through university social networks between November 3 and December 18, 2020. The questionnaire, comprising 64 questions, assessed students' knowledge, perceptions, and practices related to COVID-19. Descriptive statistics and chi-square tests were used for analysis. Results: Of 207 participants, 59.4% have worked outside the home during the study period. However, most students claimed to have respected social isolation, worn masks, and had appropriate hygiene practices. Most students intend to maintain prevention/control practices, which were mostly learned from social media, after the pandemic ends. Students were optimistic about the control of COVID-19 in the near future, but many have claimed to be mentally shaken and unmotivated. Most endorse vaccination and are against applying treatments without scientific evidence. Conclusion: This study provides a novel insight into the perceptions and practices of university students from various academic disciplines in Brazil regarding COVID-19. The findings underscore the ongoing need for targeted interventions addressing both the physical and mental health challenges faced by university students, which remain relevant even after the end of the pandemic.
... It serves as an effective tool for influencing behavior and promoting both individual and societal well-being (Rosenberg et al., 2020). Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have become valuable sources of information during the COVID-19 pandemic by facilitating the dissemination of news related to its spread (Ahmad & Murad, 2020;Cinelli et al., 2020). With people largely confined to their homes during this crisis, there has been a significant increase in social media usage (Dalle Adnan et al., 2021). ...
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This study sheds light on the use of social media, particularly Facebook, by members of the 19th Jordanian Parliament to address the COVID-19 crisis. The study examines the patterns, sources, tones, and frames adopted in COVID-19-related posts by Jordanian Members of Parliament. A content analysis approach is used to collect data, relying on the theory of social responsibility. A total of 634 posts regarding COVID-19 were taken from 39 different Facebook accounts of MPs, selected through simple random sampling. Among the notable findings of this study: text accompanied by images was the most commonly used format by MPs, and official sources were the most preferred by Jordanian MPs regarding COVID-19 information. Additionally, most posts had a neutral tone, while the majority were framed within a responsibility framework. This study encourages further research attention on the use of social media by political leaders during health crises.
... Speakers more analytical use high number of personal pronouns and reference to himself/herself, as well focus the "hereand now" context. In this psycholinguistic analysis, it is important to examine the misinformation disseminated by social media and by government leaders from the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis [13][14][15] . During lockdown, parts of the discourse of government leaders were misinterpreted and fed into the misinformation disseminated on social media. ...
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Between 2020 and 2022, lockdown and restraining measures as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in daily routines and also in language usage. At certain points during the pandemic, populations in some countries were unwilling or unlikely to respond to government messages, either because of the tone and analytic discourse used by leaders, or because they did not understand the messages. Linguistic markers and meanings were therefore linked to low levels of engagement, negative emotions and high levels of analytical thinking, especially in relation to the discourses of influential international leaders. We subjected sixteen speeches by eight country leaders to topic modelling and sentiment analysis in order to understand how the psychological functions of language were affected during two different periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this topic analysis we organize 39,073 words collected from sixteen authentic speeches delivered in two different periods of the acute phase of the pandemic. These were encoded in the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count program (LIWC), with the main aim being to identify differences between the periods. We examined the following aspects: (1) the emotional tone, analytical thinking and clout (empathy dimension); (2) the changes in these three dimensions or factors between periods 1 and 2 (February and May 2020). We observed a negative relationship between emotional tone and analytical thinking and a positive relationship between clout and emotional tone. When we considered the changes in pandemic circumstances, the psycholinguistic profiles of eight country leaders demonstrated fluctuations in language and emotions. Further reviews and research should focus on the current language and deficit wording of this population (leaders). We also note that psychologists and schoolteachers can play an important role in supporting language programmes with positive wording and by emphasising the collateral effects of face-to-face classes when teaching children to read and write.
... It serves as an effective tool for influencing behavior and promoting both individual and societal well-being (Rosenberg et al., 2020). Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have become valuable sources of information during the COVID-19 pandemic by facilitating the dissemination of news related to its spread (Ahmad & Murad, 2020;Cinelli et al., 2020). With people largely confined to their homes during this crisis, there has been a significant increase in social media usage (Dalle Adnan et al., 2021). ...
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تلقي هذه الدراسة الضوء على استخدام وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي، والفيسبوك على وجه الخصوص، من قبل أعضاء البرلمان الأردني التاسع عشر لمعالجة أزمة فيروس كورونا. تبحث الدراسة في النماذج والمصادر والنغمات والأطر التي تم تبنيها في المشاركات المتعلقة بـ COVID-19 من قبل النواب الأردنيين. تأخذ الدراسة نهج تحليل المحتوى لجمع البيانات بالاعتماد على نظرية المسؤولية الاجتماعية. تم أخذ ما مجموعه 634 منشورًا بخصوص COVID-19 من 39 حسابًا مختلفًا لأعضاء مجلس النواب تم اختيارهم من خلال أخذ عينات عشوائية بسيطة. من بين النتائج البارزة لهذه الدراسة: تعتبر النصوص المصحوبة بصور النماذج الأكثر استخدامًا من قبل النواب، وتعد المصادر الرسمية الأكثر تفضيلًا لدى النواب الأردنيين حول COVID-19. بالإضافة إلى ذلك، فإن معظم المنشورات لها نغمات محايدة، بينما يتم تأطير معظم المنشورات وفقًا لإطار المسؤولية. تشجع هذه الدراسة على أهمية تسليط الاهتمامات البحثية على استخدام وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي بين القادة السياسيين أثناء الأزمات الصحية.
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the community. This resulted in 1500 tweets relating to 1274 false and 226 partially false claims, respectively. Exploratory analysis of author accounts revealed that the verified twitter handle(including Organisation/celebrity) are also involved in either creating(new tweets) or spreading(retweet) the misinformation. Additionally, we found that false claims propagate faster than partially false claims. Compare to a background corpus of COVID-19 tweets, tweets with misinformation are more often concerned with discrediting other information on social media. Authors use less tentative language and appear to be more driven by concerns of potential harm to others. Our results enable us to suggest gaps in the current scientific coverage of the topic as well as propose actions for authorities and social media users to counter misinformation.
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The social brain hypothesis approximates the total number of social relationships we are able to maintain at 150. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information we can access online, our attention span still remains limited. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that online users are more likely to ignore dissenting information, choosing instead to interact with information adhering to their own point of view. In this paper, we quantitatively analyse users’ attention economy in news consumption on social media by analysing 14 million users interacting with 583 news outlets (pages) on Facebook over a time span of six years. In particular, we explore how users distribute their activity across news pages and topics. On the one hand, we find that, independently of their activity, users show a tendency to follow a very limited number of pages. On the other hand, users tend to interact with almost all the topics presented by their favoured pages. Finally, we introduce a taxonomy accounting for users’ behaviour to distinguish between patterns of selective exposure and interest. Our findings suggest that segregation of users in echo chambers might be an emerging effect of users’ activity on social media and that selective exposure—i.e. the tendency of users to consume information adhering to their preferred narratives—could be a major driver in their consumption patterns.
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Mathematical models of social contagion that incorporate networks of human interactions have become increasingly popular, however, very few approaches have tackled the challenges of including complex and realistic properties of socio-technical systems. Here, we define a framework to characterize the dynamics of the Maki–Thompson rumour spreading model in structured populations, and analytically find a previously uncharacterized dynamical phase transition that separates the local and global contagion regimes. We validate our threshold prediction through extensive Monte Carlo simulations. Furthermore, we apply this framework in two real-world systems, the European commuting and transportation network and the Digital Bibliography and Library Project collaboration network. Our findings highlight the importance of the underlying population structure in understanding social contagion phenomena and have the potential to define new intervention strategies aimed at hindering or facilitating the diffusion of information in socio-technical systems. The mathematical modelling of how information spreads in social networks has latterly gained fresh urgency. A study of realistic structured populations now identifies the threshold at which the propagation of rumours becomes contagious, thereby inducing a phase transition.
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While the historical impact of rumours and fabricated content has been well documented, efforts to better understand today’s challenge of information pollution on a global scale are only just beginning. Concern about the implications of dis-information campaigns designed specifically to sow mistrust and confusion and to sharpen existing sociocultural divisions using nationalistic, ethnic, racial and religious tensions is growing. The Council of Europe report on “Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making” is an attempt to comprehensively examine information disorder and to outline ways to address it.
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With people moving out of physical public spaces due to containment measures to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, online platforms become even more prominent tools to understand social discussion. Studying social media can be informative to assess how we are collectively coping with this unprecedented global crisis. However, social media platforms are also populated by bots, automated accounts that can amplify certain topics of discussion at the expense of others. In this paper, we study 43.3M English tweets about COVID-19 and provide early evidence of the use of bots to promote political conspiracies in the United States, in stark contrast with humans who focus on public health concerns.
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Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on the openness of debates. Despite increasing efforts, the dynamics leading to the emergence of these phenomena remain unclear. We propose a model that introduces the dynamics of radicalization as a reinforcing mechanism driving the evolution to extreme opinions from moderate initial conditions. Inspired by empirical findings on social interaction dynamics, we consider agents characterized by heterogeneous activities and homophily. We show that the transition between a global consensus and emerging radicalized states is mostly governed by social influence and by the controversialness of the topic discussed. Compared with empirical data of polarized debates on Twitter, the model qualitatively reproduces the observed relation between users’ engagement and opinions, as well as opinion segregation in the interaction network. Our findings shed light on the mechanisms that may lie at the core of the emergence of echo chambers and polarization in social media.