A first look at COVID-19 information and misinformation sharing on Twitter - Identifying Myths Figure

- 40.5% of tweets containing misinformation could be traced back to social media sites using the included URL
- Many of these sites provide dubious and unreliable information: e.g. thepigeonexporess.com and New York Times had almost the same number of shares even though one source is significantly less established and trusted 

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

- Searched “Coronavirus Common Myths” using different websites to find the most common ones through sources such as blogs, newspapers/media, and medical organizations
- Grouped myths with common themes together and ranked how dangerous they were to the well-being of the general public
- Chose 10 myths to study in more detail (i.e. home remedies, conspiracy theories about the virus origin, misinformation about warm climates killing the virus)
- Searched the 10 myths on Twitter for 10 tweets that were most closely related to each of the myths to further reduce the 10 myths into top 5 most common myths on Twitter (flu comparison, heat kills disease, home remedies, origin of Covid-19, vaccine development) 
- About 16,000 tweets (a little less than 0.6% of all tweets) pertained to these 5 myths

A first look at COVID-19 information and misinformation sharing on Twitter - Identifying Myths Data Collection

Singh, L., Bansal, S., Bode, L., Budak, C., Chi, G., Kawintiranon, K., ... & Wang, Y. (2020). A first look at COVID-19 information and misinformation sharing on Twitter. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.13907. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13907. 

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