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arXiv · 2608.15691

BERTopic-Virality Prioritisation: A Scalable Framework for Thematic and Comparative Analysis of COVID-19 and Monkeypox Misinformation on Twitter

Mkululi Sikosana·Sean Maudsley-Barton·Oluwaseun Ajao
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Abstract

Health misinformation circulating during pandemics can gain traction rapidly, creating harmful narratives that compete with public health guidance. Most topic-modelling pipelines treat engagement as an external outcome, limiting their ability to prioritise semantically coherent topics that are also rapidly diffusing. We introduce BERTopic-VP, a virality-prioritised topic-modelling framework that combines contextual embedding-based clustering (BERTopic) with a post hoc Virality Prioritisation (VP) layer. The pipeline is complemented by a two-stage hybrid misinformation detection module that fuses a supervised content-based classifier with an external verification signal derived from public-health knowledge bases. Applied to three benchmark datasets, COVID-19_FNIR, Monkeypox, and Constraint, the framework achieves strong classification performance, with F1 up to 0.950 and ROC-AUC up to 0.989, while identifying high-impact clusters under top 1%, 5%, and 10% VP thresholds. For datasets without native engagement metadata, prioritisation is based on a logistic propensity-to-spread score, used as an ordinal proxy for diffusion potential rather than a direct measure of engagement. The results show that integrating semantic structure, virality-aware ranking, and affective-linguistic profiling enables scalable and interpretable comparative analysis of misinformation across pandemics. The proposed framework supports monitoring-oriented early warning by surfacing low-volume but high-risk narratives for analyst review.

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Mkululi Sikosana, Sean Maudsley-Barton, Oluwaseun Ajao. 2026-08-16. BERTopic-Virality Prioritisation: A Scalable Framework for Thematic and Comparative Analysis of COVID-19 and Monkeypox Misinformation on Twitter. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15691

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