Abstract
Misinformation entails disseminating falsehoods that lead to society’s slow fracturing via decreased trust in democratic processes, institutions, and science. The public has grown aware of the role of social media as a superspreader of untrustworthy information, where even pandemics have not been immune. In this paper, we focus on COVID-19 misinformation and examine a subset of 2.1M tweets to understand misinformation as a function of engagement, tweet content (COVID-19- vs. non-COVID-19-related), and veracity (misleading or factual). Using correlation analysis, we show the most relevant feature subsets among over 126 features that most heavily correlate with misinformation or facts. We found that (i) factual tweets, regardless of whether COVID-related, were more engaging than misinformation tweets; and (ii) features that most heavily correlated with engagement varied depending on the veracity and content of the tweet.
L. Giovanini and S. Gilda are co-first authors. They have equal contribution.
M. Silva and F. Ceschin are co-second authors. They have equal contribution.
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Notes
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In order to comply with Twitter’s Terms of Service (https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/agreement-and-policy), we omitted the tweet’s raw text, as well as any features that could potentially reveal the users’ identity.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2028734, by the University of Florida Seed Fund award P0175721, and by the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University award 61632-01/PO# 262143. This material is based upon work supported by (while serving at) the National Science Foundation.
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Giovanini, L. et al. (2023). People Still Care About Facts: Twitter Users Engage More with Factual Discourse than Misinformation. In: Arief, B., Monreale, A., Sirivianos, M., Li, S. (eds) Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data. SocialSec 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14097. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5177-2_1
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