As the novel coronavirus spreads across the world, concerns regarding the spreading of misinformation about it are also growing. Here we estimate the prevalence of links to low-credibility information on Twitter during the outbreak, and the role of bots in spreading these links. We find that the combined volume of tweets linking to low-credibility information is comparable to the volume of New York Times articles and CDC links. Content analysis reveals a politicization of the pandemic. The majority of this content spreads via retweets. Social bots are involved in both posting and amplifying low-credibility information, although the majority of volume is generated by likely humans. Some of these accounts appear to amplify low-credibility sources in a coordinated fashion.
@article{arxiv.2004.14484,
title = {Prevalence of Low-Credibility Information on Twitter During the COVID-19 Outbreak},
author = {Kai-Cheng Yang and Christopher Torres-Lugo and Filippo Menczer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.14484},
year = {2020}
}