Top Concerns of Tweeters During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Infoveillance Study

By Alaa A. Abd-alrazaq, Dari Alhuwail, Mowafa Said Househ, Mounir Hamdi, Zubair Shah. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2020

688 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background The recent coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is taking a toll on the world’s health care infrastructure as well as the social, economic, and psychological well-being of humanity. Individuals, organizations, and governments are using social media to communicate with each other on a number of issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not much is known about the topics being shared on social media platforms relating to COVID-19. Analyzing such information can help policy makers and health care organizations assess the needs of their stakeholders and address them appropriately. Objective This study aims to identify the main topics posted by Twitter users related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Leveraging a set of tools (Twitter’s search application programming interface (API), Tweepy Python library, and PostgreSQL database) and using a set of predefined search terms (“corona,” “2019-nCov,” and “COVID-19”), we extracted the text and metadata (number of likes and retweets, and user profile information including the number of followers) of public English language tweets from February 2, 2020, to March 15, 2020. We analyzed the collected tweets using word frequencies of single (unigrams) and double words (bigrams). We leveraged latent Dirichlet allocation for topic modeling to identify topics discussed in the tweets. We also performed sentiment analysis and extracted the mean number of retweets, likes, and followers for each topic and calculated the interaction rate per topic. Results Out of approximately 2.8 million tweets included, 167,073 unique tweets from 160,829 unique users met the inclusion criteria. Our analysis identified 12 topics, which were grouped into four main themes: origin of the virus; its sources; its impact on people, countries, and the economy; and ways of mitigating the risk of infection. The mean sentiment was positive for 10 topics and negative for 2 topics (deaths caused by COVID-19 and increased racism). The mean for tweet topics of account followers ranged from 2722 (increased racism) to 13,413 (economic losses). The highest mean of likes for the tweets was 15.4 (economic loss), while the lowest was 3.94 (travel bans and warnings). Conclusions Public health crisis response activities on the ground and online are becoming increasingly simultaneous and intertwined. Social media provides an opportunity to directly communicate health information to the public. Health systems should work on building national and international disease detection and surveillance systems through monitoring social media. There is also a need for a more proactive and agile public health presence on social media to combat the spread of fake news.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Epidemiology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f4b27c763f0ee28c625df6076983587a7fbb0f4

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Citations in the corpus

How Adolescents Use Social Media to Cope with Feelings of Loneliness and Anxiety During COVID-19 Lockdown (2020, neutral): “32 Social media are often used (even by governments) to distribute information about the measures.”
The changes in the effects of social media use of Cypriots due to COVID-19 pandemic (2020, neutral): “[14] also state that governments should be more active on social media to provide dynamic information regarding urgent issues.”
Twitter Discussions and Emotions About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Machine Learning Approach (2020, background): “Compared with a study examining public discussions and concerns related to COVID-19 using Twitter data from January 20 to March 7, 2020, we found that several salient topics are no longer popular: (1) an outbreak in South Korea, (2) the Diamond Princess cruise ship, (3) the economic impact [11,32], ”
Digital Health Strategies to Fight COVID-19 Worldwide: Challenges, Recommendations, and a Call for Papers (2020, background): “Social media data analysis is also relevant during the COVID-19 outbreak to monitor how people react to the pandemic evolution over time (sentiment, anxiety, level of stress) as well as common beliefs, opinions [39,40], fears, or hopes regarding treatment or vaccines.”
Social media influence in the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “A good example can be seen with the peak of searches for information on the Internet and social media platforms in China preceding the peak of incidence in COVID-19 cases by 10-14 days, with which Internet and social media networks searches have a demonstrated correlation with the incidence of disea”
Tracking Social Media Discourse About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development of a Public Coronavirus Twitter Data Set (2020, background): “More importantly during the current COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter provides researchers the ability to study the role social media plays in the global health crisis [15-19].”