Privacy concerns and conspiracy theories: how do they spread on Twitter?

Social media apps and platforms are under siege as they are accused to exploit user data to profile and target invasively social media users. To control the diffusion of the COVID-19 disease, some policy makers introduced contact-tracing apps (Ferretti et al., 2020), feeding a stream of discussion on the internet. Social media users display concerns and fear about the commercial use of their personal information in a mix between privacy concerns and explanations related to conspiracy theories. In particular, the announcement of the release of tracing apps has stimulated the proliferation of social media debates regarding their actual benefits (Birnbaum & Spolar, 2020) and privacy concerns about the use and storage of sensitive data (Miller & Abboud, 2020). In addition, contact tracing apps have been also alleged to be part of conspiracies plans against individuals’ freedom (Appleby, 2020). As social media play a key role in determining behaviours (Alabash et al., 2015; Godey et al., 2016), the proliferation of negative discussions around these apps represents a barrier to its adoption. Marketing literature and practice lack in understanding the main psychological barriers to the adoption of apps that exploit users’ personal information to market their services. Under the hypothesis that user-generated content may unveil their privacy concerns or their tendency to explain significant social and political events with conspiracy theories, our study proposes a semantic analysis of the tweets that followed the launch of the Italian “Immuni” contact-tracing app. In particular, we develop custom dictionary to identify the semantic characteristics that affect tweets virality.