Identification and Analysis of Opinion Leaders for COVID-19 Related Rumor Spreading in Social Media

Abstract:
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, thousands of rumors have occurred on social media, and it is significant to identify opinion leaders who play decisive roles during rumor spreading. However, existing literature lacks such opinion leaders identification and following analysis of COVID-19 background. So this paper takes a COVID-19 case as an example and collects data from Sina Weibo, which is a popular twitter-like social media in China. Then three different centrality measures are applied. Finally, a venn diagram is used to analyze opinion leaders identified, and profiles of them on Weibo are taken into consideration. In conclusion, the paper finds that opinion leaders identified during rumor spreading are institutional and individual accounts with a huge number of followers. But in terms of numbers, government institutions spread information to more people; in terms of breadth, impactful individual accounts deliver more information to more people from all walks of life.