COVID-19 Conspiracy Superspreaders on Twitter

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Hazel Kwon, who continues the COVID-19 mis- and disinformation theme. Such conspiracist claims often focussed on powerful actors (politicians and others), and this represents a reductionist worldview; these claims can have very direct material impacts on communities, for instance when they question the established science and promote vaccine hesitancy.

Some such conspiracy theories focussed directly on Bill Gates and his foundation’s work on vaccination; the present paper examines the superspreaders of such ideas on Twitter during the last three quarters of 2020. Tweets were linked to major events in the COVID-19 trajectory of that year. Superspreaders in the dataset were identified based on outsized posting and retweeting activities, selecting the 260 accounts with at least 50 Gates tweets during this time. These 0.17% of accounts posted nearly 10% of Gates tweets; many of them have since been suspended by Twitter.

Botometer shows low botness scores for these accounts, even in spite of their very high volumes of of tweets. Topics covered by such accounts shared typical conspiracy theories linking Gates to ‘microchip’, ‘Wuhan’, ‘5G’, and other typical COVID-19 conspiracy topics. World Economic Forum, contract-tracing, and trolling-related topics were more prominent in superspreader tweets than in ordinary accounts’ tweets, though.