Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 4, 2021
Date Accepted: Apr 16, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Apr 21, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Bots and misinformation spread on social media: A mixed scoping review with implications for COVID-19
ABSTRACT
As of December 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been responsible for over 78 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide, resulting in over 1.7 million deaths. In the United States in particular, protective measures against the COVID-19 pandemic have been hampered by political polarization and discrepancies among federal, state, and local policies. As a result, a huge amount of information surrounding COVID-19, some of it contradictory or blatantly false, has proliferated on social media. In this mixed scoping review, we survey the role of automated accounts, or “bots,” in spreading misinformation during past epidemics, natural disasters, and politically polarizing events through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic. We also review strategies used by bots to spread (mis)information and machine learning methods for detecting bot activity. We conclude by conducting and presenting a secondary analysis of known bots, finding that up to 66% of bots are discussing COVID-19. The proliferation of COVID-19 (mis)information by bots, coupled with human susceptibility to believing and sharing misinformation, may well impact the course of the pandemic.
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