Paper: Riding information crises: the performance of far-right Twitter users in Australia during the 2019–2020 bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic
In our paper out with Information, Communication & Society, we find that far-right accounts overperformed on Twitter during Covid-19 and associate it with more information disorder.
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We find that far-right accounts did overperform at the onset of the pandemic if compared to selected control accounts. (As expected, journalists and politicians also overperformed during both during Covid-19 as well as during the 2019-20 Australian bushfires). We observe that the structural position of far-right accounts on Twitter changed during Covid-19: from peripheral and disconnected from the rest of the conversation to peripheral but connected.
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We associate the overperformance of the far-right community with an increase in information disorder during the pandemic (the number of domains linked from the conversation increases while the proportion of authoritative sources decreases).
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🚨 New paper out with @icsjournal with @ameliajohns13 and @andrei_rizoiu on information crises and disorders. 🚨
— Francesco Bailo (@FrancescoBailo) May 1, 2023
We find that far-right accounts overperformed on Twitter during Covid-19 and associate it with more information disorder.
Open access here: https://t.co/c4jdCFvOfg pic.twitter.com/qrMz3kCKKB