Hate multiverse spreads malicious COVID-19 content online beyond individual platform control

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how malicious COVID-19 content, including hate speech and misinformation, rapidly spreads across multiple online platforms, leveraging online hate communities, with a mathematical model predicting the viral spread threshold and informing mitigation policies.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical model predicting the viral spread of malicious COVID-19 content across online platforms, and analyzes how hate communities weaponize COVID-19 to facilitate rapid dissemination.

Findings

Online hate communities rapidly evolve and coherently spread COVID-19 content.

A generalized R0 model predicts the tipping point for multiverse-wide viral spread.

Policy options can mitigate spread without platform coordination.

Abstract

We show that malicious COVID-19 content, including hate speech, disinformation, and misinformation, exploits the multiverse of online hate to spread quickly beyond the control of any individual social media platform. Machine learning topic analysis shows quantitatively how online hate communities are weaponizing COVID-19, with topics evolving rapidly and content becoming increasingly coherent. Our mathematical analysis provides a generalized form of the public health R0 predicting the tipping point for multiverse-wide viral spreading, which suggests new policy options to mitigate the global spread of malicious COVID-19 content without relying on future coordination between all online platforms.