People Still Care About Facts: Twitter Users Engage More with Factual Discourse than Misinformation--A Comparison Between COVID and General Narratives on Twitter
This research provides insights into user engagement with factual content versus misinformation on Twitter, which is important for understanding information spread and combating misinformation.
This paper analyzed 2.1 million tweets to compare engagement with factual discourse versus misinformation, specifically focusing on COVID-19 and general narratives. The study found that factual tweets, regardless of COVID-19 relevance, generated more engagement than misinformation tweets.
Misinformation entails the dissemination of falsehoods that leads to the slow fracturing of society via decreased trust in democratic processes, institutions, and science. The public has grown aware of the role of social media as a superspreader of untrustworthy information, where even pandemics have not been immune. In this paper, we focus on COVID-19 misinformation and examine a subset of 2.1M tweets to understand misinformation as a function of engagement, tweet content (COVID-19- vs. non-COVID-19-related), and veracity (misleading or factual). Using correlation analysis, we show the most relevant feature subsets among over 126 features that most heavily correlate with misinformation or facts. We found that (i) factual tweets, regardless of whether COVID-related, were more engaging than misinformation tweets; and (ii) features that most heavily correlated with engagement varied depending on the veracity and content of the tweet.