Going viral: How a single tweet spawned a COVID-19 conspiracy theory on Twitter

Abstract

In late March of 2020, a new hashtag, #FilmYourHospital, made its first appearance on social media. The hashtag encouraged people to visit local hospitals to take pictures and videos of empty hospitals to help “prove” that the COVID-19 pandemic is an elaborate hoax. Using techniques from Social Network Analysis, this case study examines how this conspiracy theory propagated on Twitter and whether the hashtag virality was aided by the use of automation or coordination among Twitter users. We found that while much of the content came from users with limited reach, the oxygen that fueled this conspiracy in its early days came from a handful of prominent conservative politicians and far right political activists on Twitter. These power users used this hashtag to build awareness about the campaign and to encourage their followers to break quarantine and film what is happening at their local hospitals. After the initial boost by a few prominent accounts, the campaign was mostly sustained by pro-Trump accounts, followed by a secondary wave of propagation outside the U.S. The rise of the #FilmYourHospital conspiracy from a single tweet demonstrates the ongoing challenge of addressing false, viral information during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the spread of misinformation can be potentially mitigated by fact-checking and directing people to credible sources of information from public health agencies, false and misleading claims that are driven by politics and supported by strong convictions and not science are much harder to root out.

Trust in scientists and non-populist governments supports COVID-19 information and safeguarding behaviors

“…This effect may have been cancelled out since trust in one's national government is predictive of conspiracy thinking in some countries, but distrust in others. Contrary to previous findings (Gruzd & Mai, 2020), we found that Twitter was predictive of perceived knowledge and not conspiracy thinking. Twitter has been a source of COVID-19 misinformation (Kouzy et al, 2020), but it is also a place in which research is shared amongst scientists, who may have large followings.…”

The use of Twitter by state leaders and its impact on the public during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Numerous studies have been published that examined spreading misinformation on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic (Gruzd and Mai, 2020;Lovari, 2020;P erez-Dasilva et al, 2020;Pulido et al, 2020;Rodríguez et al, 2020;Vraga et al, 2020). For example, Pulido et al (2020) find that false information about the pandemic is tweeted more but retweeted less than science-based tweets.…”

Design and analysis of a large-scale COVID-19 tweets dataset

“…Multiple studies have performed social network analysis on Twitter data related to the COVID-19 pandemic. A case study [17] examined the propagation of the #FilmYourHospital hashtag using social network analysis techniques to understand whether the hashtag virality was aided by bots or coordination among Twitter users. Another study [2] collected tweets containing the #5GCoronavirus hashtag between March 27, 2020, and April 4, 2020, and performed network analysis to understand the drivers of the 5G COVID-19 conspiracy theory and strategies to deal with such misinformation.…”