News creation and consumption has been changing since the advent of social media. An estimated 2.95 billion people in 2019 used social media worldwide. The widespread of the Coronavirus COVID-19 resulted with a tsunami of social media. Most platforms were used to transmit relevant news, guidelines and precautions to people. According to WHO, uncontrolled conspiracy theories and propaganda are spreading faster than the COVID-19 pandemic itself, creating an infodemic and thus causing psychological panic, misleading medical advises, and economic disruption. Accordingly, discussions have been initiated with the objective of moderating all COVID-19’s communications, except those initiated from trusted sources such as the WHO and authorized governmental entities. This article presents a large-scale study based on data mined from Twitter. Extensive analysis has been performed on approximately one million COVID-19 related tweets collected over a period of two months. Furthermore, the profiles of 288,000 users were analyzed including unique users’ profiles, meta-data and tweets’ context. The study noted various interesting conclusions including the critical impact in term of reach level of the (1) exploitation of the COVID-19 crisis to redirect readers to irrelevant topics and (2) widespread of unauthentic medical precautions and information. Further data analysis revealed the importance of using social networks in a global pandemic crisis by relying on credible users with variety of occupations, content developers and influencers in specific fields. In this context, several insights and findings have been provided while elaborating computing and non-computing implications and research directions for potential solutions and social networks management strategies during crisis periods.

中文翻译：

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社交网络信息流行病对战胜冠状病毒 COVID-19 大流行的关键影响：基于 Twitter 的研究和研究方向

自社交媒体出现以来，新闻创作和消费一直在发生变化。据估计，2019 年全球有 29.5 亿人使用社交媒体。冠状病毒 COVID-19 的广泛传播引发了社交媒体的海啸。大多数平台被用来向人们传播相关新闻、指南和预防措施。据世卫组织称，不受控制的阴谋论和宣传的传播速度比 COVID-19 大流行本身还要快，造成信息流行病，从而引起心理恐慌、误导性医疗建议和经济破坏。因此，已经启动了讨论，目的是调节所有 COVID-19 的通信，但那些从可信来源（如 WHO 和授权的政府实体）发起的通信除外。本文介绍了一项基于从 Twitter 挖掘的数据的大规模研究。对两个月内收集的大约一百万条与 COVID-19 相关的推文进行了广泛的分析。此外，还分析了 288,000 名用户的个人资料，包括独特用户的个人资料、元数据和推文的上下文。该研究指出了各种有趣的结论，包括 (1) 利用 COVID-19 危机将读者重定向到不相关的主题和 (2) 不真实的医疗预防措施和信息的广泛传播。进一步的数据分析揭示了在全球大流行危机中通过依赖具有各种职业的可信用户、内容开发者和特定领域的影响者来使用社交网络的重要性。在这种情况下，