# What Types of COVID-19 Conspiracies are Populated by Twitter Bots?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09531 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09531/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [In Context Learning and Reasoning for Symbolic Regression with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17448/) (2024)
- [Misleading the Covid-19 vaccination discourse on Twitter: An exploratory study of infodemic around the pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10735/) (2021)
- [HP-BERT: A framework for longitudinal study of Hinduphobia on social media via language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05482/) (2025)
- [Detecting Propaganda on the Sentence Level during the COVID-19 Pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12269/) (2021)
- [Health Misinformation in Social Networks: A Survey of IT Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18670/) (2024)
- [Unmasking Superspreaders: Data-Driven Approaches for Identifying and Comparing Key Influencers of Conspiracy Theories on X.com](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04546/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With people moving out of physical public spaces due to containment measures to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, online platforms become even more prominent tools to understand social discussion. Studying social media can be informative to assess how we are collectively coping with this unprecedented global crisis. However, social media platforms are also populated by bots, automated accounts that can amplify certain topics of discussion at the expense of others. In this paper, we study 43.3M English tweets about COVID-19 and provide early evidence of the use of bots to promote political conspiracies in the United States, in stark contrast with humans who focus on public health concerns.