The current COVID-19 pandemic and its uncertainty have given rise to various myths and rumours. These myths spread incredibly fast through social media, which has caused massive panic in society. In this paper, we comprehensively examined the prevailing myths related to COVID-19 in regard to the diffusion of myths, people's engagement with myths and people's subjective emotions to myths. First, we classified the myths into five categories: spread of infection, preventive measures, detection measures, treatment and miscellaneous. We collected the tweets about each category of myths from 1 January to 7 July in the year 2020. We found that the vast majority of the myth tweets were about the spread of the infection. Next, we fitted myths spreading with the SIR epidemic model and calculated the basic reproduction number $R_0$ for each category of myths. We observed that the myths about the spread of infection and preventive measures propagated faster than other categories of myths, and more miscellaneous myths raised and quickly spread from later June 2020. We further analyzed people's emotions evoked by each category of myths and found that fear was the strongest emotion in all categories of myths and around 64% of the collected tweets expressed the emotion of fear. The study in this paper provides insights for authorities and governments to understand the myths during the eruption of the pandemic, and hence enable targeted and feasible measures to demystify the most concerned myths in due time.

中文翻译：

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对COVID-19大流行期间Twitter上流传的神话的分析和见解

当前的COVID-19大流行及其不确定性引起了各种神话和谣言。这些神话在社交媒体上迅速传播，这引起了社会的极大恐慌。在本文中，我们从神话的传播，人们对神话的参与以及人们对神话的主观情感方面全面研究了与COVID-19相关的流行神话。首先，我们将神话分为五类：感染的传播，预防措施，检测措施，治疗和其他。我们收集了2020年1月1日至7月7日有关每个类别的神话的推文。我们发现，绝大多数神话推文都与感染的传播有关。接下来，我们用先生 流行模型并计算 基本繁殖数 $ R_0 $对于每个神话类别。我们观察到，关于感染传播和预防措施的神话比其他类别的神话传播得更快，并且从2020年6月下旬开始出现了更多杂种神话并迅速传播。我们进一步分析了每种类别的神话引起的人们的情绪，发现恐惧是在所有类别的神话中，最强烈的情感和大约64％的推文表达了恐惧的情感。本文的研究为当局和政府了解大流行病的神话提供了见识，从而有针对性和可行的措施适时揭开了最令人关注的神话的神秘面纱。