#Democrats are destroying America: Rumour analysis on twitter during COVID-19

COVID-19 has brought about significant economic and social disruption, and misinformation thrives during this uncertain period. In this paper, we apply state-of-the-art rumour detection systems that leverage both text content and user metadata to classify COVID-19 related rumours, and analyse how users, topics and emotions of rumours differ from non-rumours. We found that a number of interesting insights, e.g. rumour-spreading users have a disproportionately smaller number of followers compared to their followees, rumour topics largely involve politics (with an abundance of party blaming), and rumours tend to be emotionally charged (anger) but reactions towards rumours exhibit disapproving sentiments.