Flow of online misinformation during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on every human activity and, because of the urgency of finding the proper responses to such an unprecedented emergency, it generated a diffused societal debate. The online version of this discussion was not exempted by the presence of misinformation campaigns, but, differently from what already witnessed in other debates, the COVID-19 -intentional or not- flow of false information put at severe risk the public health, possibly reducing the efficacy of government countermeasures. In this manuscript, we study the effective impact of misinformation in the Italian societal debate on Twitter during the pandemic, focusing on the various discursive communities. In order to extract such communities, we start by focusing on verified users, i.e., accounts wh

SUBMITTER: Caldarelli G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8258478 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature