Dataset release and publication at WebSci 2022

Our paper “The Disinformation Dozen: An Exploratory Analysis of Covid-19  Disinformation Proliferation on Twitter” has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 14th ACM Web Science Conference 2022.

In this paper, we analyzed the online activity of a set of twelve individuals, referred to as Disinformation Dozen, responsible for 65% of Covid-19 misinformation circulating on social media. In particular, we performed an exploratory analysis on Disinformation Dozen’s activity on Twitter aiming at identifying their sharing strategies, favorite sources of information, and potential secondary actors contributing to the proliferation of questionable narratives. In our study, we uncovered the distinctive facets that allowed Disinfo12 to act as primary sources of information, and we recognized that YouTube represents one of the favorite information sources to spread questionable narratives and conspiracy theories. Finally, we recognized that right-leaning accounts are embedded in Disinfo12’s community and represent the main spreaders of content generated by the Disinformation Dozen.

We also released the dataset used for this analysis, which includes the IDs of the collected tweets and is available at the following link: https://github.com/gi-ux/Disinformation-Dozen-TweetIDs