Hate multiverse spreads malicious COVID-19 content online beyond individual platform control

Understand

We show that malicious COVID-19 content, including hate speech, disinformation, and misinformation, exploits the multiverse of online hate to spread quickly beyond the control of any individual social media platform.

• Machine learning topic analysis shows quantitatively how online hate communities are weaponizing COVID-19, with topics evolving rapidly and content becoming increasingly coherent.
• Our mathematical analysis provides a generalized form of the public health R0 predicting the tipping point for multiverse-wide viral spreading, which suggests new policy options to mitigate the global spread of malicious COVID-19 content without relying on future coordination between all online platforms.