Assessing the risks of "infodemics" in response to COVID-19 epidemics

Abstract

Our society is built on a complex web of interdependencies whose effects become manifest during extraordinary events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, with shocks in one system propagating to the others to an exceptional extent. We analyzed more than 100 millions Twitter messages posted worldwide in 64 languages during the epidemic emergency due to SARS-CoV-2 and classified the reliability of news diffused. We found that waves of unreliable and low-quality information anticipate the epidemic ones, exposing entire countries to irrational social behavior and serious threats for public health. When the epidemics hit the same area, reliable information is quickly inoculated, like antibodies, and the system shifts focus towards certified informational sources. Contrary to mainstream beliefs, we show that human response to falsehood exhibits early-warning signals that might be mitigated with adequate communication strategies.

arXiv commentThe dataset analyzed in this paper can be interactively visualized and accessed at https://covid19obs.fbk.eu/

References in corpus (12)

• Emergence of scaling in random networks
• Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks
• The science of fake news
• Epidemic processes in complex networks
• The Rise of Social Bots
• The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
• The physics of spreading processes in multilayer networks
• Bots increase exposure to negative and inflammatory content in online social systems
• Disinformation and Social Bot Operations in the Run Up to the 2017 French Presidential Election
• Interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement
• Unraveling the Origin of Social Bursts in Collective Attention
• Influence of augmented humans in online interactions during voting events

Cited by in corpus (51)

• What social media told about us in the time of COVID-19: a scoping review
• Robustness and resilience of complex networks
• Non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic: a rapid review
• A Decade of Social Bot Detection
• Human Mobility Trends during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States
• Studying Fake News Spreading, Polarisation Dynamics, and Manipulation by Bots: a Tale of Networks and Language
• One Year of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation on Twitter: Longitudinal Study
• Sustained Online Amplification of COVID-19 Elites in the United States
• Flow of online misinformation during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy
• Information disorders on Italian Facebook during COVID-19 infodemic
• Two Stage Transformer Model for COVID-19 Fake News Detection and Fact Checking
• Causal Modeling of Twitter Activity During COVID-19
• Dark Web Marketplaces and COVID-19: before the vaccine
• The voice of few, the opinions of many: evidence of social biases in Twitter COVID-19 fake news sharing
• Firms' Challenges and Social Responsibilities during Covid-19: a Twitter Analysis
• Analyzing COVID-19 on Online Social Media: Trends, Sentiments and Emotions
• Percolation on feature-enriched interconnected systems
• How does Twitter account moderation work? Dynamics of account creation and suspension on Twitter during major geopolitical events
• Spreading dynamics of information on online social networks
• Beyond network centrality: Individual-level behavioral traits for predicting information superspreaders in social media
• An Overview of Healthcare Data Analytics With Applications to the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Sustainable Development Goals as unifying narratives in large UK firms' Twitter discussions
• ArCOV19-Rumors: Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset for Misinformation Detection
• Modeling the amplification of epidemic spread by individuals exposed to misinformation on social media
• Political Context of the European Vaccine Debate on Twitter
• Collective response to the media coverage of COVID-19 Pandemic on Reddit and Wikipedia
• A Multi-Platform Collection of Social Media Posts about the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections
• Complexity of Government response to Covid-19 pandemic: A perspective of coupled dynamics on information heterogeneity and epidemic outbreak
• Coexistence of positive and negative information in information-epidemic dynamics on multiplex networks
• The COVID-19 Infodemic: Twitter versus Facebook
• Endemic infectious states below the epidemic threshold and beyond herd immunity
• Differential impact from individual versus collective misinformation tagging on the diversity of Twitter (X) information engagement and mobility
• Decoding the News Media Diet of Disinformation Spreaders
• VaccinItaly: monitoring Italian conversations around vaccines on Twitter and Facebook
• Characterizing Twitter users behaviour during the Spanish Covid-19 first wave
• Combating fake news by empowering fact-checked news spread via topology-based interventions
• Rumor Propagation and Supervision during Confrontation: An Importance-Driven SIRQS Network Model
• Interplay between exogenous triggers and endogenous behavioral changes in contagion processes on social networks
• Considerations, Good Practices, Risks and Pitfalls in Developing AI Solutions Against COVID-19
• A data-driven analysis of the impact of non-compliant individuals on epidemic diffusion in urban settings
• Effects of Antivaccine Tweets on COVID-19 Vaccinations, Cases, and Deaths
• Volunteer contributions to Wikipedia increased during COVID-19 mobility restrictions
• Effective one-dimension reduction of multi-compartment complex systems dynamics
• Analysis of External Content in the Vaccination Discussion on Twitter
• Exploring the effect of social media and spatial characteristics during the COVID-19 pandemic in China
• Detecting Propaganda on the Sentence Level during the COVID-19 Pandemic
• #lockdown: network-enhanced emotional profiling at the times of COVID-19
• Characterizing the roles of bots during the COVID-19 infodemic on Twitter
• Competing spreading dynamics in simplicial complex
• The Evolution of Rumors on a Closed Platform during COVID-19
• Italian Twitter semantic network during the Covid-19 epidemic