Who Needs the Red Pill: Hydroxychloroquine Wars on Twitter

Abstract

The paper discusses the emergence of misinformation about the COVID-19 treatment on Twitter during the scientific and public discussion about the effectiveness of the hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for the treatment of the disease. The authors analyze direct and indirect influence of media personas on the misinformation spread basing on the 1,356 information cascades found in a collection of 10 million tweets published from March 30 to July 13, 2020. The complied list of personas involved in active discussion of the COVID-19 treatment in information cascades showed that the most popular sources of health information for Twitter users are posts from politicians. The discussions around the tweets from politicians produce deep cascades distorting the content of the original message and increasing the emotionality. Semantic and discourse analysis of the tweets allowed to identify the main reasons for the distortion of reliable medical information and the emergence of disinformation disseminated by users commenting on tweets of the media personas. It was found that medical information is distorted in information cascades due to confusion of terms in user’s comments, substitution of logical connections with associative ones, omission of essential details, unjustified generalization, and exaggeration of the significance of references to the personal experience. An important reason of misinformation is the politicization and polarization of the discussion of the COVID-19 treatment.