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

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.15691v1 Announce Type: cross 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 (BER