A Different COVID-19 Model: Characterizing the Spread of Misinformation of COVID-19 on Twitter

Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, mathematicians have mobilized to create models to predict the rise of COVID-19 through communities. In parallel to the spread of the virus, there has been an equally insidious spread of misinformation across various social media platforms. In this presentation, we will analyze the similarities and differences in transmission of various types of misinformation spread over Twitter in the past year. We build and analyze network graphs for the tweets (and retweets) of multiple types of misinformation (e.g, benign, conspiracy theory) and determine the characteristics that distinguish them. Can we predict the type of misinformation based on the way it spreads over twitter?