Characterizing the COVID-19 Infodemic on Chinese Social Media: Exploratory Study

BackgroundThe COVID-19 infodemic has been disseminating rapidly on social media and posing a significant threat to people’s health and governance systems. ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate and analyze posts related to COVID-19 misinformation on major Chinese social media platforms in order to characterize the COVID-19 infodemic. MethodsWe collected posts related to COVID-19 misinformation published on major Chinese social media platforms from January 20 to May 28, 2020, by using PythonToolkit. We used content analysis to identify the quantity and source of prevalent posts and topic modeling to cluster themes related to the COVID-19 infodemic. Furthermore, we explored the quantity, sources, and theme characteristics of the COVID-19 infodemic over time. ResultsThe daily number of social media posts related to the COVID-19 infodemic was positively correlated with the daily number of newly confirmed (r=0.672, P