Twitter and Facebook posts about COVID-19 are less likely to spread false and low-credibility content compared to other health topics

Understand

On February 2, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a COVID-19 social media "infodemic", with special attention to misinformation -- frequently understood as false claims.

• To understand the infodemic's scope and scale, we analyzed over 500 million posts from Twitter and Facebook about COVID-19 and other health topics, between March 8 and May 1, 2020.
• Following prior work, we assumed URL source credibility is a proxy for false content, but we also tested this assumption.
• Contrary to expectations, we found that messages about COVID-19 were more likely to contain links to more credible sources.