A Study of Social Network Messages During the COVID-19 Infodemic: Salient Features and the Propagation of Information Types

ABSTRACT

Amid a world of the COVID-19 pandemic, people often have turned to social media as a means of communicating and receiving information. Within existing social networks one can discover a wide range of messages that vary in sentiment, measure of helpfulness, and/or intended harm. In this paper, we measure the utility of Tweets based on their ability to propagate throughout the Twittersphere as well as the salient features that contribute to their successful propagation. In this work, we consider five types of Tweets that can be classified as (1) Caution & Advice, (2) Doubt & Criticism, (3) Rumor & Counter-Rumors, (4) Generic Harm, and (5) Non-Situational Information. Our results suggest that, on average, Caution & Advice messages propagate fastest while messages classified as Generic Harm have the slowest propagation.