Investigating Unrelated #COVID19 Twitter Expressions: Implications of Spam Content on Information Credibility

ABSTRACT

Twitter is considered one of the most popular social networking platforms. More than microblogging, it has evolved to be an integral source of information from daily news, current events, and other trending topics on social media. Since the emergence of COVID-19 in Asia in 2019, Twitter has become one of the platforms primarily utilized for information seeking and sharing by Internet users to keep updated with and disseminate relevant information about the virus and its spread. However, the health crisis was no exception in attracting the attention of spammers in exploiting the platform with scams and other malicious content. In this study, tweets containing trending hashtags related to COVID-19 were culled from Twitter to investigate the presence of spam tweets and to assess its possible impact on the information credibility of the platform. Though results suggest that the volume of unrelated Twitter expressions was minimal, this research argues that irrelevant tweets were substantial enough to pose implications detrimental to hashtag use and knowledge discovery. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.