2020/04/20 by Emilio Ferrara · 1 voice · 146 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #2019-20 coronavirus outbreak #Coping (psychology) #Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) #Focus (optics) #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Politics #Social media #Spam and Phishing Detection #cs.SI #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · open access · doi:10.5210/fm.v25i6.10633
published in First Monday (University of Illinois at Chicago) · Published in: First Monday, 25(6), 2020; https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10633
arxiv published 2020/04/20 · openalex publication_date 2020/05/19 · arxiv created 2020/06/02 · arxiv updated 2020/06/03 · openalex created_date 2020/06/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
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.