Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 10, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 10, 2020 - Jul 13, 2020
Date Accepted: Sep 15, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Sep 16, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
COVID-19 and the “Film Your Hospital” Conspiracy Theory: Social Network Analysis of Twitter Data
ABSTRACT
Background:
During the COVID-19 Pandemic a number of conspiracy theories have emerged. A popular theory notes that the COVID-19 Pandemic is a hoax by suggesting that certain hospitals are ‘empty’. Research has shown that accepting conspiracy theories raises the chances that an individual may ignore government advice around social-distancing and other public health interventions. Due to the chance of a second-wave, it is important to gain an understanding of the drivers of misinformation and strategies to mitigate it.
Objective:
This study set out to evaluate the #FilmYourHospital conspiracy theory on Twitter, attempting to understand the drivers of the conspiracy theory on Twitter. More specifically, the objectives were as followed: what online sources of information were used as evidence to support the theory, what ratio of automated accounts compared to organic accounts were present in the network and what lessons can be learnt in order to mitigate the spread of such a conspiracy theory in the future.
Methods:
Twitter data related to the #FilmYourHospital hashtag was retrieved and analysed using social network analysis from a 7-day period from Monday 13 April and Monday 20 April. The dataset consisted of 22,785 tweets and 11,333 Twitter users. The Botometer was used to identify accounts with a higher probability of being bots.
Results:
The most important drivers of the conspiracy theory are ordinary citizens, one of the most influential being a pro-Brexit supporter. It was found that YouTube was the information source most linked to by users. The most retweeted post belonged to a bluetick ‘verified’ Twitter user, indicating that the user may have had more influence on the platform. It was found that there was a small number of automated accounts (bots) as well as accounts deleted within the network.
Conclusions:
Hashtags using and sharing conspiracy theories can be targeted in an effort to delegitimize content containing misinformation. Social media organisations need to reinforce their efforts to label and/or remove content that contains misinformation. Public health authorities could enlist the assistance of influencers in order to spread anti-narrative content.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.