I found this study interesting – they evaluated the viral spread of COVID-19 truth vs misinformation, and some other mis/disinformation.
Over 24 million retweets were analysed on Twitter.
Overall, they found that :
· “COVID-19 misinformation is more likely to go viral than truthful information”.
· Moral emotions moderated this spread: a higher number of condemning emotion words (words with contempt, anger, disgust – called the ‘hostility triad’) led to higher viral spread, whereas higher self-conscious emotion words (shame, pride, guilt) led to les viral spread
· The effects were also pronounced for health misinformation and false political rumours
Their findings are said to align with previous research (which was outside of COVID-19).
They argue that the effects of condemning emotion words on virality is likely due to high polarisation of social media users regarding COVID.
It’s noted “In polarizing debates, radical ideas and beliefs are strengthened and more likely to translate into action. It thus seems plausible that the explosive mix of other-condemning emotions accelerates the spread of false rumors about those topics within social networks”.
Ref: Solovev, K., & Pröllochs, N. (2022, April). Moral emotions shape the virality of COVID-19 misinformation on social media. In Proceedings of the ACM web conference 2022 (pp. 3706-3717).
Study link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3485447.3512266
SafetyInsights.org 
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