RESEARCH Flow of online misinformation during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy Guido Caldarelli1,2,3*†, Rocco De Nicola3,5†, Marinella Petrocchi4,3†, Manuel Pratelli3† and Fabio Saracco3† *Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract 1Department of Molecular Sciences and Nanosystems, Ed. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on every human activity and, because of Alfa, Via Torino 155, 30170 the urgency of finding the proper responses to such an unprecedented emergency, Venezia Mestre, Italy it generated a diffused societal debate. The online version of this discussion was Full list of author information is available at the end of the article not exempted by the presence of d/misinformation campaigns, but differently †Equal contributor from what already witnessed in other debates, the COVID-19 -intentional or not- flow of false information put at severe risk the public health, reducing the effectiveness of governments' countermeasures. In the present manuscript, we study the effective impact of misinformation in the Italian societal debate on Twitter during the pandemic, focusing on the various discursive communities. In order to extract the discursive communities, we focus on verified users, i.e. accounts whose identity is officially certified by Twitter. We thus infer the various discursive communities based on how verified users are perceived by standard ones: if two verified accounts are considered as similar by non unverified ones, we link them in the network of certified accounts. We first observe that, beside being a mostly scientific subject, the COVID-19 discussion show a clear division in what results to be different political groups. At this point, by using a commonly available fact-checking software (NewsGuard), we assess the reputation of the pieces of news exchanged.