The DOI matches its Crossref record; 87 of the 87 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
What types of COVID-19 conspiracies are populated by Twitter bots?
Open accessAbstract
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.
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“Twitter bots utilizing COVID-19 content to spread political conspiracies [34]”
From Future directions for chatbot research: An interdisciplinary research agenda (2021) · cites this paper as [34]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Ferrara, E.
- Affiliations
- University of Southern California (US)
- Corresponding author
- Ferrara, Emilio
- ORCID
- Ferrara, Emilio
- Venue
- First Monday
- Publisher
- University of Illinois Libraries
- Published
- 2020-05-19
- ISSN
- 1396-0458 (ISSN-L)
- 1396-0466
- OpenAlex
- W3032981809
- Cited by
- 223
- References
- 86
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 18 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 43 · 2022: 43 · 2021: 56 · 2020: 34
- FWCI
- 58.73
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Locations
- First Monday (publishedVersion)
- First Monday (acceptedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Communication › Communication and COVID-19 Impact
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Keywords
- COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter bots, political conspiracy, misinformation, automated accounts, social media, public health discourse, online political discussion, United States
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