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Bots as Active News Promoters: A Digital Analysis of COVID-19 Tweets
| Content Provider | MDPI |
|---|---|
| Author | Al-Rawi, Ahmed Shukla, Vishal |
| Copyright Year | 2020 |
| Description | In this study, we examined the activities of automated social media accounts or bots that tweet or retweet referencing #COVID-19 and #COVID19. From a total sample of over 50 million tweets, we used a mixed method to extract more than 185,000 messages posted by 127 bots. Our findings show that the majority of these bots tweet, retweet and mention mainstream media outlets, promote health protection and telemedicine, and disseminate breaking news on the number of casualties and deaths caused by COVID-19. We argue that some of these bots are motivated by financial incentives, while other bots actively support the survivalist movement by emphasizing the need to prepare for the pandemic and learn survival skills. We only found a few bots that showed some suspicious activity probably due to the fact that our dataset was limited to two hashtags often used by official health bodies and academic communities. |
| Starting Page | 461 |
| e-ISSN | 20782489 |
| DOI | 10.3390/info11100461 |
| Journal | Information |
| Issue Number | 10 |
| Volume Number | 11 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | MDPI |
| Publisher Date | 2020-09-27 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Information Information and Library Science Medical Informatics Bots Covid-19 Twitter Social Media Health Communication |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
