Abstract
A graph analysis on the tweets and users networks from a set of curated news was done to study the existing difference in communication patterns between legitimate and misinformation news. Our findings suggest there is no difference in the influence of misinformation and legitimate news but misinformation news tend to be more shared and present than legitimate news, meaning that while misinformation tweets do not have more influence, their authors are more prolific. Misinformation reach wider audience even if the tweets, individually, are not more influential. A subsequent qualitative analysis on the users reveal that there is also influence of misinformation spreading in Spain from other Spanish speaking countries.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This project is financed by the BBVA Foundation in its 2019 call for Ayudas a Equipos de Investigación Científica en el área de Economía y Sociedad Digital. https://www.rrssalud.org.
- 3.
Sources: EFE Verifica, Maldita and Newtral.
- 4.
The figure shows a big clique of 45 nodes, those tweets are the same tweets being posted by the same user and this user liking its own tweets.
References
Alstott, J., Bullmore, E., Plenz, D.: PowerLaw: a Python package for analysis of heavy-tailed distributions. PLoS One 9(1), e85777 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0085777. http://arxiv.org/abs/1305. 0215. arXiv: 1305.0215
Bessi, A., Coletto, M., Davidescu, G.A., Scala, A., Caldarelli, G., Quattrociocchi, W.: Science vs conspiracy: collective narratives in the age of misinformation. PLOS One 10(2), e0118093 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0118093. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0118093. Publisher: Public Library of Science
Blondel, V.D., Guillaume, J.L., Lambiotte, R., Lefebvre, E.: Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. J. Stat. Mech.: Theory Exp. 2008(10), P10008 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008. http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0476. arXiv: 0803.0476
Huang, B., Carley, K.M.: Disinformation and misinformation on Twitter during the novel coronavirus outbreak. arXiv:2006.04278 [cs], June 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/2006.04278
Mathews, P., Mitchell, L., Nguyen, G., Bean, N.: The nature and origin of heavy tails in retweet activity. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion - WWW 2017 Companion, pp. 1493–1498. ACM Press, Perth (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3041021.3053903. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3041021.3053903
McQuillan, L., McAweeney, E., Bargar, A., Ruch, A.: Cultural convergence: insights into the behavior of misinformation networks on Twitter. arXiv:2007.03443 [physics], July 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.03443. arXiv: 2007.03443
Memon, S.A., Carley, K.M.: Characterizing COVID-19 misinformation communities using a novel twitter dataset. arXiv:2008.00791 [cs], September 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/2008.00791
Myers, S.A., Sharma, A., Gupta, P., Lin, J.: Information network or social network?: the structure of the twitter follow graph. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 493–498. ACM, Seoul Korea, April 2014. https://doi.org/10.1145/2567948.2576939. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2567948.2576939
Newman, M.E.J.: Mixing patterns in networks. Phys. Rev. E 67(2), 026126 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.67.026126. http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0209450. arXiv: cond-mat/0209450
Nieminen, J.: On the centrality in a graph. Scand. J. Psychol. 15(1), 332–336 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9450.1974.tb00598.x. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9450.1974.tb00598.x
Pal, A., Counts, S.: Identifying topical authorities in microblogs. In: Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining - WSDM 2011, p. 45. ACM Press, Hong Kong (2011). https://doi.org/10.1145/1935826.1935843. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1935826.1935843
Riquelme, F., González-Cantergiani, P.: Measuring user influence on Twitter: a survey. Inform. Process. Manage. 52(5), 949–975 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2016.04.003. http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.07951. arXiv: 1508.07951
Salaverría, R., Buslón, N., López-Pan, F., León, B., López-Goñi, I., Erviti, M.C.: Desinformación en tiempos de pandemia: tipología de los bulos sobre la Covid-19. El Prof. Inform. 29(3) (2020). https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.may.15. https://revista.profesionaldelainformacion.com/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2020.may.15
Singh, L., et al.: A first look at COVID-19 information and misinformation sharing on Twitter. arXiv:2003.13907 [cs], March 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13907
Viviani, M., Pasi, G.: Credibility in social media: opinions, news, and health information—a survey. WIREs Data Min. Knowl. Discov. 7(e01209), 1–25 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1002/widm.1209. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/widm.1209
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Saby, D. et al. (2021). Twitter Analysis of Covid-19 Misinformation in Spain. In: Mohaisen, D., Jin, R. (eds) Computational Data and Social Networks. CSoNet 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91434-9_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91434-9_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-91433-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91434-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)