Candice Lanius 
candice.lanius@uah.edu
Ryan Weber 
ryan.weber@uah.edu

analysis, almost 25% of COVID-19-related tweets contained 
some misinformation (Kouzy et al. 2020). Much of this mis-
information spreads through bots, automated accounts that 
often share false or conspiracy-based information in order 
to amplify a political message. According to one analysis 
of COVID-19 information on Twitter, bot accounts share 
a high volume of tweets linking to low-credibility sources 
(Yang et al. 2020). Analysis has also revealed that “high bot 
score accounts are used to promote political conspiracies 
and divisive hashtags alongside with COVID-19 content” 
(Ferrara 2020 p. 17), while accounts likely run by humans 
focus more on health and public welfare.
Use of bot and content flags to limit the spread of misinformation among social networks: a behavior and attitude survey