Sharing (Mis)information: A Social Network Analysis of Vaccine-related URLs on Twitter during COVID-19

Abstract

Collecting 4,435 tweets with the hashtag vaccine from December 11 to December 14, 2020, this study investigates the main web domains people share on Twitter when talking about the COVID19 vaccine. Drawing a bipartite network graph with NodeXL Pro, the researcher applied a social network analysis and identified 29 of the most shared websites. The study found two misinformation websites attracting more sharing behaviors than some news agencies, such as usatoday.com and vox.com, and explored how users used the contents from the websites within their tweets. The findings provide insights on misinformation identification and management during a public health crisis.