2020

The COVID-19 Social Media Infodemic

Cinelli, Matteo, Quattrociocchi, Walter, Galeazzi, Alessandro et al.

Understand

We address the diffusion of information about the COVID-19 with a massive data analysis on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Gab.

We analyze engagement and interest in the COVID-19 topic and provide a differential assessment on the evolution of the discourse on a global scale for each platform and their users.
We fit information spreading with epidemic models characterizing the basic reproduction numbers $R_0$ for each social media platform.
Moreover, we characterize information spreading from questionable sources, finding different volumes of misinformation in each platform.

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