How COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories Spread on Twitter

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dc.contributor.author Gruzd, Anatoliy
dc.contributor.author Ghenai, Amira
dc.contributor.author Mai, Philip
dc.date.accessioned 2023-12-26T18:38:36Z
dc.date.available 2023-12-26T18:38:36Z
dc.date.issued 2024-01-03
dc.identifier.isbn 978-0-9981331-7-1
dc.identifier.other bd6823f2-238e-48d8-b4ac-b76d9223cf63
dc.identifier.uri https://hdl.handle.net/10125/106682
dc.language.iso eng
dc.relation.ispartof Proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
dc.rights Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
dc.subject Data Analytics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning for Social Media
dc.subject conspiracy theories
dc.subject covid-19
dc.subject social media
dc.subject twitter
dc.subject vaccine hesitancy
dc.title How COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories Spread on Twitter
dc.type Conference Paper
dc.type.dcmi Text
dcterms.abstract Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories (CTs) related to the virus have been widely circulated on social media. The uncertainty surrounding the pandemic and available treatment options likely contributed to the wide dissemination of such theories on social media platforms like Twitter. This retrospective study examines the spread of CTs surrounding Bill Gates and COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter and identifies what accounts contributed to their dissemination. Based on the social network analysis of 100,601 Bill Gates and vaccine-related tweets shared by 71,364 users between March 1 and May 31, 2020, the study found that automated and suspended accounts had a significant impact on the spread of CTs around this topic. Their tweets were more likely to be reshared by others than by chance alone. This highlights the need for social media platforms to continue to act against harmful automated accounts, particularly considering recent trends to ease content moderation policies and debunking interventions by social media giants in the post-pandemic era.
dcterms.extent 10 pages
prism.startingpage 2465
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