COVID-19's (mis)information ecosystem on Twitter: How partisanship boosts the spread of conspiracy narratives on German speaking Twitter

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories on German Twitter, revealing that partisanship influences dissemination, while automated accounts have minimal impact on misinformation spread.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale analysis of COVID-19 misinformation on German Twitter, highlighting the role of partisanship and the limited influence of bots.

Findings

Only 0.6% of tweets are conspiracy-related.

Partisan users contribute more to conspiracy dissemination.

Automated accounts account for about 1.31% of conspiracy activity.

Abstract

In late 2019, the gravest pandemic in a century began spreading across the world. A state of uncertainty related to what has become known as SARS-CoV-2 has since fueled conspiracy narratives on social media about the origin, transmission and medical treatment of and vaccination against the resulting disease, COVID-19. Using social media intelligence to monitor and understand the proliferation of conspiracy narratives is one way to analyze the distribution of misinformation on the pandemic. We analyzed more than 9.5M German language tweets about COVID-19. The results show that only about 0.6% of all those tweets deal with conspiracy theory narratives. We also found that the political orientation of users correlates with the volume of content users contribute to the dissemination of conspiracy narratives, implying that partisan communicators have a higher motivation to take part in conspiratorial discussions on Twitter. Finally, we showed that contrary to other studies, automated accounts do not significantly influence the spread of misinformation in the German speaking Twitter sphere. They only represent about 1.31% of all conspiracy-related activities in our database.