Abstract

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 43.3 M English tweets about COVID-19 and provide early evidence of the use of bots to promote political conspiracies in the US, but also as a tool to enable participatory activism to surface information in the English-speaking Twitter that could otherwise be censored in China.

Date

2020

Authors

Emilio Ferrara

Journal

arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.09531