The World Health Organization has not only signaled the health risks of COVID-19, but also labeled the situation as infodemic, due to the amount of information, true and false, circulating around this topic. Research shows that, in social media, falsehood is shared far more than evidence-based information. However, there is less research analyzing the circulation of false and evidence-based information during health emergencies. Thus, the present study aims at shedding new light on the type of tweets that circulated on Twitter around the COVID-19 outbreak for two days, in order to analyze how false and true information was shared. To that end, 1000 tweets have been analyzed. Results show that false information is tweeted more but retweeted less than science-based evidence or fact-checking tweets, while science-based evidence and fact-checking tweets capture more engagement than mere facts. These findings bring relevant insights to inform public health policies.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19 信息流行病：关于冠状病毒的基于科学的信息的转发比虚假信息的转发更多

世界卫生组织不仅发出了 COVID-19 的健康风险信号，而且将这种情况标记为信息流行病，因为围绕该主题传播的信息量不分真假。研究表明，在社交媒体中，虚假信息的传播远远超过循证信息。然而，分析突发卫生事件期间虚假和循证信息传播的研究较少。因此，本研究旨在阐明在 COVID-19 爆发前后两天在 Twitter 上传播的推文类型，以分析虚假和真实信息的共享方式。为此，我们分析了 1000 条推文。结果表明，与基于科学的证据或事实核查的推文相比，虚假信息的推文更多，但转发的推文更少，而基于科学的证据和事实核查推文比单纯的事实吸引了更多的参与。这些发现为公共卫生政策提供了相关见解。