Promoting and countering misinformation during Australia's 2019-2020 bushfires: a case study of polarisation.

ABSTRACT: During Australia's unprecedented bushfires in 2019-2020, misinformation blaming arson surfaced on Twitter using #ArsonEmergency. The extent to which bots and trolls were responsible for disseminating and amplifying this misinformation has received media scrutiny and academic research. Here, we study Twitter communities spreading this misinformation during the newsworthy event, and investigate the role of online communities using a natural experiment approach-before and after reporting of bots promoting the hashtag was broadcast by the mainstream media. Few bots were found, but the most bot-like accounts were social bots, which present as genuine humans, and trolling behaviour was evident. Further, we distilled meaningful quantitative differences between two polarised communities in

SUBMITTER: Weber D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9243896 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature