Prevalence of Low-Credibility Information on Twitter During the COVID-19 Outbreak

Understand

As the novel coronavirus spreads across the world, concerns regarding the spreading of misinformation about it are also growing.

• Here we estimate the prevalence of links to low-credibility information on Twitter during the outbreak, and the role of bots in spreading these links.
• We find that the combined volume of tweets linking to low-credibility information is comparable to the volume of New York Times articles and CDC links.
• Content analysis reveals a politicization of the pandemic.