The Structural Influence of Low-Credibility Narratives During the COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout
For social media researchers and platform moderators, this work provides a more accurate method to quantify narrative influence and reveals the distinct roles of humans and bots in spreading misinformation during different event stages.
This study proposes two novel metrics, Appeal and Scope, to measure the structural influence of low-credibility narratives on social media. Analyzing 5.8 million X messages about COVID-19 vaccines, it finds that human-distributed narratives achieved higher structural influence than bot-generated ones, with humans peaking during the Vaccine Launch week and bots during the Pre-Vaccine period.
This work examines the structural influence of low-credibility narratives and the comparative role of automated accounts (bots) versus human users on social media platforms. To more accurately quantify the structural influence of a narrative on social media, this study proposes two novel metrics: (1) Appeal, which measures the network-weighted popularity of a message; and (2) Scope, which measures an author's message popularity-weighted network penetration. Applying these metrics, this study analyzes 5.8 million messages from X that contain low-credibility narratives regarding COVID-19 vaccine across three distinct temporal stages: Pre-Vaccine, Vaccine Launch, and Post-Launch. The results demonstrate that across all timeframes, human-distributed low-credibility narratives achieved higher structural influence compared to those generated by automated accounts. Furthermore, statistical analysis reveals a significant conditional temporal effect: human-driven low-credibility narratives attained their highest Appeal and Scope during the focal Vaccine Launch week, whereas automated accounts maximized their Appeal and Scope during the highly uncertain Pre-Vaccine period. These findings highlight the distinct operational capacities of automated and organic accounts, illustrating how the Appeal and Scope of low-credibility narratives is moderated by the lifecycle stages of critical public events.