  The spread of coronavirus and anti-vaccine conspiracies online hindered
public health responses to the pandemic. We examined the content of external
articles shared on Twitter from February to June 2020 to understand how
conspiracy theories and fake news competed with legitimate sources of
information. Examining external content--articles, rather than social media
posts--is a novel methodology that allows for non-social media specific
analysis of misinformation, tracking of changing narratives over time, and
determining which types of resources (government, news, scientific, or dubious)
dominate the pandemic vaccine conversation. We find that distinct narratives
emerge, those narratives change over time, and lack of government and
scientific messaging on coronavirus created an information vacuum filled by
both traditional news and conspiracy theories.
