Researchers find coordinated effort to promote conspiracy theory that
Coronavirus is a bioweapon engineered by China
Misinformation about the origins of Covid-19 is far more likely to be spread by pro-Trump, QAnon or
Republican bots on
Twitter than any other source, according to a study commissioned by the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology.
In late March, when the coronavirus pandemic was taking hold in the US and across much of the rest of the world, two researchers at Queensland University of Technology, Timothy Graham and Axel Bruns, analysed 2.6m tweets related to coronavirus, and 25.5m retweets of those tweets, over the course of 10 days.