Social Science Research Council Research AMP Just Tech
Citation

Hate multiverse spreads malicious COVID-19 content online beyond individual platform control

Author:
Velásquez, N.; Leahy, R.; Restrepo, N. Johnson; Lupu, Y.; Sear, R.; Gabriel, N.; Jha, O.; Goldberg, B.; Johnson, N. F.
Year:
2020

We show that malicious COVID-19 content, including hate speech,
disinformation, and misinformation, exploits the multiverse of online hate to
spread quickly beyond the control of any individual social media platform.
Machine learning topic analysis shows quantitatively how online hate
communities are weaponizing COVID-19, with topics evolving rapidly and content
becoming increasingly coherent. Our mathematical analysis provides a
generalized form of the public health R0 predicting the tipping point for
multiverse-wide viral spreading, which suggests new policy options to mitigate
the global spread of malicious COVID-19 content without relying on future
coordination between all online platforms.