An Exploratory Study of COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the community. This resulted in 1 500 tweets relating to 1 274 false and 276 partially false claims, respectively. Exploratory analysis of author accounts revealed that the verified twitter handle(including Organisation/celebrity) are also involved in either creating (new tweets) or spreading (retweet) the misinformation. Additionally, we found that false claims propagate faster than partially false claims. Compare to a background corpus of COVID-19 tweets, tweets with misinformation are more often concerned with discrediting other information on social media. Authors use less tentative language and appear to be more driven by concerns of potential harm to others. Our results enable us to suggest gaps in the current scientific coverage of the topic as well as propose actions for authorities and social media users to counter misinformation.Comment: 20 pages, nine figures, four tables. Submitted for peer review, revision

An Exploratory Study of COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the community. This resulted in 1500 tweets relating to 1274 false and 226 partially false claims, respectively. Exploratory analysis of author accounts revealed that the verified twitter handle(including Organisation/celebrity) are also involved in either creating(new tweets) or spreading(retweet) the misinformation. Additionally, we found that false claims propagate faster than partially false claims. Compare to a background corpus of COVID-19 tweets, tweets with misinformation are more often concerned with discrediting other information on social media. Authors use less tentative language and appear to be more driven by concerns of potential harm to others. Our results enable us to suggest gaps in the current scientific coverage of the topic as well as propose actions for authorities and social media users to counter misinformation

ERPs Reveal Disengagement Processes Related to Condom Use Embarrassment in Intention-Behavior Inconsistent Young Adults

The use of barrier protections such as condoms has consistently been reported to reduce the acquisition of sexually transmitted infections. However, it has also been reported that the association between condom use intentions and behavior is, at best, often weak. Furthermore, embarrassment associated with purchasing condoms and negotiating their use has been shown to negatively impact the frequency of condom use. Using electroencephalography to analyze P300 event-related potential components known to measure early attention allocation, we examined electrophysiological evidence of early attention disengagement for embarrassing health information. Forty young adults-34 females and six males-participated in an adapted version of Posner's visual cueing paradigm. All were high in intention to use condoms, but half were intention-behavior consistent and half were intention-behavior inconsistent. Compared to intention-behavior consistent participants, those with intention-behavior inconsistency showed a reduced P300 component when attending to a visual target opposite to the field in which embarrassing self-relevant health information was presented, indicating more efficient early attention disengagement from such embarrassing health information. In conclusion, our electrophysiological data suggest that high intention alone may be not sufficient to predict adolescents' condom use behavior

Connectomic profile and clinical phenotype in newly diagnosed glioma patients

Gliomas are primary brain tumors, originating from the glial cells in the brain. In contrast to the more traditional view of glioma as a localized disease, it is becoming clear that global brain functioning is impacted, even with respect to functional communication between brain regions remote from the tumor itself. However, a thorough investigation of glioma-related functional connectomic profiles is lacking. Therefore, we constructed functional brain networks using functional MR scans of 71 glioma patients and 19 matched healthy controls using the automated anatomical labelling (AAL) atlas and interregional Pearson correlation coefficients. The frequency distributions across connectivity values were calculated to depict overall connectomic profiles and quantitative features of these distributions (full-width half maximum (FWHM), peak position, peak height) were calculated. Next, we investigated the spatial distribution of the connectomic profile. We defined hub locations based on the literature and determined connectivity (1) between hubs, (2) between hubs and non-hubs, and (3) between non-hubs. Results show that patients had broader and flatter connectivity distributions compared to controls. Spatially, glioma patients particularly showed increased connectivity between non-hubs and hubs. Furthermore, connectivity distributions and hub-non-hub connectivity differed within the patient group according to tumor grade, while relating to Karnofsky performance status and progression-free survival. In conclusion, newly diagnosed glioma patients have globally altered functional connectomic profiles, which mainly affect hub connectivity and relate to clinical phenotypes. These findings underscore the promise of using connectomics as a future biomarker in this patient population