Who’s Retweeting You?: A Selection from Nicholas A. Christakis’s Apollo’s Arrow (2020)

“An extensive analysis of Twitter data from January 16, 2020, to March 15, 2020, revealed that the sharing of sites full of misinformation was almost as common as the sharing of links to credible sites . . . . Another analysis of two hundred million tweets about the pandemic collected from January through May 2020 found that 62 percent of the top one thousand retweeters were bots.

There were more than a hundred different types of inaccurate information, including about quack cures, but the bots really weighed in on online conversations regarding ending stay-at-home orders and ‘reopening America.’ The researchers concluded that the bot activity seemed orchestrated, possibly by agents of the Russian or Chinese governments, and many of the tweets promoted by the bots referred to conspiracy theories such as the ones about coronavirus being linked to 5G cell phone towers.

There is increasing evidence that the Chinese and Russian governments have a long-standing and ongoing program in place to undermine Americans’ confidence in science and scientists. And formal analyses of a network of interactions among one hundred million people on Facebook show that users spreading falsehoods—for instance, about the risks of vaccination—are often better able to occupy positions of structural power in the network, dominating the conversation and increasingly winning out against true information.”—Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of the Coronavirus on the Way We Live (2020)