The spread of misinformation on Twitter has been noted 
with alarm by scholars even before COVID-19 (Zubiaga 
and Ji 2014; Waszak et al. 2018; Sommariva et al. 2018). 
When reviewing the state of medical information on social 
media, Wang et al. (2019) conclude that “misinformation 
is abundant on the internet and is often more popular than 
accurate information” (p. 7), while Chen and colleagues 
(2018) found that medical misinformation spread more 
broadly on Twitter than accurate information. For instance, 
misleading information about Zika on Twitter was more 
popular than accurate posts (Sharma et al. 2017). With the 
rise in AI, bots spread much of this disinformation, often 

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Social Network Analysis and Mining (2021) 11:32
Use of bot and content flags to limit the spread of misinformation among social networks: a behavior and attitude survey