Cite Bailo, F., Johns, A., & Rizoiu, M.-A. (2024). Riding information crises: The performance of far-right Twitter users in Australia during the 2019–2020 bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. Information, Communication & Society, 27(2), 278–296. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2023.2205479

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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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