  With people moving out of physical public spaces due to containment measures
to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, online platforms become
even more prominent tools to understand social discussion. Studying social
media can be informative to assess how we are collectively coping with this
unprecedented global crisis. However, social media platforms are also populated
by bots, automated accounts that can amplify certain topics of discussion at
the expense of others. In this paper, we study 43.3M English tweets about
COVID-19 and provide early evidence of the use of bots to promote political
conspiracies in the United States, in stark contrast with humans who focus on
public health concerns.
