People Still Care About Facts: Twiter Users Engage More with Factual Discourse than MisinformationÐA Comparison Between COVID and General Narratives on Twiter MIRELA SILVA, University of Florida, USA FABRÍCIO CESCHIN, Federal University of Paraná, Brazil PRAKASH SHRESTHA, University of Florida, USA CHRISTOPHER BRANT, University of Florida, USA SHLOK GILDA, University of Florida, USA JULIANA FERNANDES, University of Florida, USA CATIA S. SILVA, University of Florida, USA ANDRÉ GRÉGIO, Federal University of Paraná, Brazil DANIELA OLIVEIRA, University of Florida, USA LUIZ GIOVANINI, University of Florida, USA Misinformation entails the dissemination of falsehoods that leads to the slow fracturing of society via decreased trust in democratic processes, institutions, and science. The public has grown aware of the role of social media as a superspreader of untrustworthy information, where even pandemics have not been immune. In this paper, we focus on COVID-19 misinformation and examine a subset of 2.1M tweets to understand misinformation as a function of engagement, tweet content (COVID-19- vs. non-COVID-19-related), and veracity (misleading or factual). Using correlation analysis, we show the most relevant feature subsets among over 126 features that most heavily correlate with misinformation or facts. We found that (i) factual tweets, regardless of whether COVID-related, were more engaging than misinformation tweets; and (ii) features that most heavily correlated with engagement varied depending on the veracity and content of the tweet. CCS Concepts: · Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy; Social network security and privacy. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants 2028734 and 1662976, Google Security and Privacy Research Award and University of Florida SeedFund OR-DRPD-ROF2020. This material is based upon work supported by (while serving at) the National Science Foundation. Authors’ addresses: Mirela Silva, msilva1@uf.edu, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Florida, P.O. Box 116200, Gainesville, FL, USA, 32611; Fabrício Ceschin, fjoceschin@inf.ufpr.br, Federal University of Paraná, Cel. Francisco Heráclito dos Santos, 100, Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, 81530-000; Prakash Shrestha, prakash.shrestha@uf.edu, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Florida, P.O. Box 116200, Gainesville, FL, USA, 32611; Christopher Brant, g8rboy15@uf.edu, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Florida, P.O. Box 116200, Gainesville, FL, USA, 32611; Shlok Gilda, shlokgilda@uf.edu, Computer and Information Science & Engineering, University of Florida, P.O. Box 116200, Gainesville, FL, USA, 32611; Juliana Fernandes, juliana@jou.uf.edu, College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida, P.O. Box 118400, Gainesville, FL, USA, 32611; Catia S. Silva, catiaspsilva@ece.uf.edu, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Florida, P.O. Box 116200, Gainesville, FL, USA, 32611; André Grégio, gregio@inf.ufpr.br, Federal University of Paraná, Cel. Francisco Heráclito dos Santos, 100, Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, 81530-000; Daniela Oliveira, daniela@ece.uf.edu, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Florida, P.O. Box 116200, Gainesville, FL, USA, 32611; Luiz Giovanini, lfrancogiovanini@uf.edu, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Florida, P.O. Box 116200, Gainesville, FL, USA, 32611. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2021 XXXX-XXXX/2021/9-ART $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn arXiv:2012.02164v3 [cs.SI] 9 Sep 2021