The spread of coronavirus and anti-vaccine conspiracies online hindered public health responses to the pandemic. We examined the content of external articles shared on Twitter from February to June 2020 to understand how conspiracy theories and fake news competed with legitimate sources of information. Examining external content--articles, rather than social media posts--is a novel methodology that allows for non-social media specific analysis of misinformation, tracking of changing narratives over time, and determining which types of resources (government, news, scientific, or dubious) dominate the pandemic vaccine conversation. We find that distinct narratives emerge, those narratives change over time, and lack of government and scientific messaging on coronavirus created an information vacuum filled by both traditional news and conspiracy theories.

翻译：我们研究了2020年2月至6月在Twitter上分享的外部文章的内容,以了解阴谋论和假新闻如何与合法信息来源相竞争。 研究外部内容文章而不是社交媒体文章是一种新颖的方法,它允许非社会媒体对错误信息进行具体分析,跟踪随着时间的推移变化的叙述,并确定哪种资源(政府、新闻、科学或可疑)在大流行病疫苗对话中占主导地位。 我们发现,出现了截然不同的描述,这些描述随着时间推移而变化,缺乏政府和科罗纳病毒科学信息造成了由传统新闻和阴谋理论填补的信息真空。