What Types of COVID-19 Conspiracies are Populated by Twitter Bots?

Understand

With people moving out of physical public spaces due to containment measures to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, online platforms become even more prominent tools to understand social discussion.

• Studying social media can be informative to assess how we are collectively coping with this unprecedented global crisis.
• However, social media platforms are also populated by bots, automated accounts that can amplify certain topics of discussion at the expense of others.
• In this paper, we study 43.3M English tweets about COVID-19 and provide early evidence of the use of bots to promote political conspiracies in the United States, in stark contrast with humans who focus on public health concerns.