Covid-19 misinformation: pro-Trump and QAnon Twitter bots found to be worst culprits

Misinformation about the origins of Covid-19 is far more likely to be spread by pro-Trump, QAnon or Republican bots on Twitter than any other source, according to a study commissioned by the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology. In late March, when the coronavirus pandemic was taking hold in the US and across much of the rest of the world, two researchers at Queensland University of Technology, Timothy Graham and Axel Bruns, analysed 2.6m tweets related to coronavirus, and 25.5m retweets of those tweets, over the course of 10 days. They filtered out legitimate accounts from those accounts most likely to be bots, which can be identified when they retweet identical...