Understanding the Humans Behind Online Misinformation: An Observational Study Through the Lens of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The proliferation of online misinformation has emerged as one of the biggest threats to society. Considerable efforts have focused on building misinformation detection models, still the perils of misinformation remain abound. Mitigating online misinformation and its ramifications requires a holistic approach that encompasses not only an understanding of its intricate landscape in relation to the complex issue and topic-rich information ecosystem online, but also the psychological drivers of individuals behind it. Adopting a time series analytic technique and robust causal inference-based design, we conduct a large-scale observational study analyzing over 32 million COVID-19 tweets and 16 million historical timeline tweets. We focus on understanding the behavior and psychology of users disseminating misinformation during COVID-19 and its relationship with the historical inclinations towards sharing misinformation on Non-COVID topics before the pandemic. Our analysis underscores the intricacies inherent to cross-topic misinformation, and highlights that users' historical inclination toward sharing misinformation is positively associated with their present behavior pertaining to misinformation sharing on emergent topics and beyond. This work may serve as a valuable foundation for designing user-centric inoculation strategies and ecologically-grounded agile interventions for effectively tackling online misinformation.