Misinformation, manipulation, and abuse on social media in the era of COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic represented an unprecedented setting for the spread of online misinformation, manipulation, and abuse, with the potential to cause dramatic real-world consequences. The aim of this special issue was to collect contributions investigating issues such as the emergence of infodemics, misinformation, conspiracy theories, automation, and online harassment on the onset of the coronavirus outbreak. Articles in this collection adopt a diverse range of methods and techniques, and focus on the study of the narratives that fueled conspiracy theories, on the diffusion patterns of COVID-19 misinformation, on the global news sentiment, on hate speech and social bot interference, and on multimodal Chinese propaganda. The diversity of the methodological and scientific approaches undertaken in the aforementioned articles demonstrates the interdisciplinarity of these issues. In turn, these crucial endeavors might anticipate a growing trend of studies where diverse theories, models, and techniques will be combined to tackle the different aspects of online misinformation, manipulation, and abuse.

Keywords: Abuse; COVID-19; Infodemics; Misinformation; Social bots; Social media.

Fig. 1

Network based on the web-page URLs shared on Twitter from January 16, 2020 to April 15, 2020 [18]. Each node represents a web-page URL, while connections indicate links among web-pages. The purple nodes represent traditional news sources, the orange nodes indicate the low-quality and misinformation news sources, and the green nodes represent authoritative health sources. The edges take the color of the source, while the node size is based on the degree