Analysis and Insights for Myths Circulating on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The current COVID-19 pandemic and its uncertainty have given rise to various myths and rumours. These myths spread incredibly fast through social media, which has caused massive panic in society. In this paper, we comprehensively examined the prevailing myths related to COVID-19 in regard to the diffusion of myths, people's engagement with myths and people's subjective emotions to myths. First, we classified the myths into five categories: spread of infection, preventive measures, detection measures, treatment and miscellaneous. We collected the tweets about each category of myths from 1 January to 7 July in the year 2020. We found that the vast majority of the myth tweets were about the spread of the infection. Next, we fitted myths spreading with the SIR epidemic model and calculated the basic reproduction number [Formula: see text] for each category of myths. We observed that the myths about the spread of infection and preventive measures propagated faster than other categories of myths, and more miscellaneous myths raised and quickly spread from later June 2020. We further analyzed people's emotions evoked by each category of myths and found that fear was the strongest emotion in all categories of myths and around 64% of the collected tweets expressed the emotion of fear. The study in this paper provides insights for authorities and governments to understand the myths during the eruption of the pandemic, and hence enable targeted and feasible measures to demystify the most concerned myths in due time.