A new study has found that factual tweets, regardless of whether they were COVID-related, were more engaging than misinformation tweets. The findings by Juliana Fernandes, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications Advertising assistant professor, and a team of 10 scholars were featured in “People Still Care About the Facts: Users Engage More with Factual Discourse Than Misinformation.

The conference research paper received the “Best Paper” award at NSS-SocialSec 2023: 17^th International Symposium on Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data in Canterbury, United Kingdom.

The authors studied COVID-19 misinformation and the role of social media as a super spreader of untrustworthy information. They examined 2.1 million tweets to understand misinformation as a function of engagement, tweet content (COVID-19 vs. non-COVID-19-related) and veracity.

According to the authors, “Using correlation analysis, we show the most relevant feature subsets among over 126 features that most heavily correlate with misinformation or facts. We found that factual tweets, regardless of whether COVID-related, were more engaging than misinformation tweets and features that most heavily correlated with engagement varied depending on the veracity and content of the tweet.

The paper will also be included in the book series “Lecture Notes in Computer Science” Volume 14097.

Posted: August 21, 2023
Category: College News, Covid-19 Updates, Research News
Tagged as: Advertising, COVID-19 Social Media, Juliana Fernandes, Misinformation, Social Sec 2023: International Symposium on Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data