Do news media and citizens have the same agenda on COVID-19? an empirical comparison of twitter posts

Han, Chunjia; Yang, Mu; Piterou, Athena

doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2021.120849

Cited by 38 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…Especially for breaking news such as the first COVID-19 deaths in Vietnam, we observed a significantly higher engagement than for COVID-19 incidence. This was also observed in previous outbreaks of influenza [ 33 ], Ebola [ 34 , 35 ], disaster emergency [ 17 ], and now with COVID-19 [ 36 – 38 ].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Using ‘infodemics’ to understand public awareness and perception of SARS-CoV-2: A longitudinal analysis of online information about COVID-19 incidence and mortality during a major outbreak in Vietnam, July—September 2020

et al. 2022

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Background Trends in the public perception and awareness of COVID-19 over time are poorly understood. We conducted a longitudinal study to analyze characteristics and trends of online information during a major COVID-19 outbreak in Da Nang province, Vietnam in July-August 2020 to understand public awareness and perceptions during an epidemic. Methods We collected online information on COVID-19 incidence and mortality from online platforms in Vietnam between 1 July and 15 September, 2020, and assessed their trends over time against the epidemic curve. We explored the associations between engagement, sentiment polarity, and other characteristics of online information with different outbreak phases using Poisson regression and multinomial logistic regression analysis. We assessed the frequency of keywords over time, and conducted a semantic analysis of keywords using word segmentation. Results We found a close association between collected online information and the evolution of the COVID-19 situation in Vietnam. Online information generated higher engagements during compared to before the outbreak. There was a close relationship between sentiment polarity and posts’ topics: the emotional tendencies about COVID-19 mortality were significantly more negative, and more neutral or positive about COVID-19 incidence. Online newspaper reported significantly more information in negative or positive sentiment than online forums or social media. Most topics of public concern followed closely the progression of the COVID-19 situation during the outbreak: development of the global pandemic and vaccination; the unfolding outbreak in Vietnam; and the subsiding of the outbreak after two months. Conclusion This study shows how online information can reflect a public health threat in real time, and provides important insights about public awareness and perception during different outbreak phases. Our findings can help public health decision makers in Vietnam and other low and middle income countries with high internet penetration rates to design more effective communication strategies during critical phases of an epidemic.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Using ‘infodemics’ to understand public awareness and perception of SARS-CoV-2: A longitudinal analysis of online information about COVID-19 incidence and mortality during a major outbreak in Vietnam, July—September 2020

et al. 2022

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“…Twitter is a type of microblogging social media platform which is and has been used as a platform for rapid and widespread sharing of information in crisis situations, including previous pandemics such as H1N1/Swine Flu and the Zika outbreak, as well as for controversial health issues such as vaccines [ 8 , 11 , 40 – 42 ]. Crisis events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, are often subject to uncertainty, where there is a lack of information and a need for sensemaking [ 43 ]. Infodemiology methods can provide ‘ direct and honest data on health information seeking behaviour’ [ 44 ] and be useful for identifying how the public use and share information sources [ 41 ].…”

Section: Digital Information Ecology and Crisis Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, Twitter can be used to address emotional needs e.g. an individual expressing concerns with their online network [ 43 ]. Existing theoretical research, on Agenda-Setting, for example, has considered how media reporting, as well as how policy and public agendas, direct public attention towards particular issues.…”

Section: Digital Information Ecology and Crisis Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A critique of crisis communication theory is the focus on organisations, rather than how publics communicate with each other, leading to calls to focus on multiple actors engaged in crisis response [ 62 , 64 ]. Furthermore, within this changing digital information system, Agenda-Setting theory recognises that these different actors (i.e., news media and individuals) are unlikely to have the same agendas when disseminating information [ 43 ]. Within this theoretical framework, there have been suggestions that traditional news media have lost some of their power and visibility in information circulation due to the plurality of voices on Twitter.…”

Section: Digital Information Ecology and Crisis Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Information sharing practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: A case study about face masks

Baker

Concannon

2022

PLoS ONE

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This article contributes an empirical analysis of information sharing practices on Twitter relating to the use of face masks in the context of COVID-19. Behavioural changes, such as the use of face masks, are often influenced by people’s knowledge and perceptions, which in turn can be affected by the information available to them. Face masks were not recommended for use by the UK public at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to developments in scientific understanding, the guidance changed and by the end of 2020 they were mandatory on public transport and in shops. This research examines tweets in this longitudinal context and, therefore, provides novel insights into the dynamics of crisis communication in an ongoing crisis event with emerging scientific evidence. Specifically, analysis of the content of tweets, external resources most frequently shared, and users sharing information are considered. The conclusions contribute to developing understanding of the digital information ecology and provide practical insights for crisis communicators. Firstly, the analysis shows changes in the frequency of tweets about the topic correspond with key guidance and policy changes. These are, therefore, points in time official channels of information need to utilise the public’s information seeking and sharing practices. Secondly, due to changes in face mask guidance and policy, the current literature on digital information ecology is insufficient for capturing the dynamic nature of a long-term ongoing crisis event. Challenges can arise due to the prolonged circulation of out-of-date information, i.e. not strategic misinformation, nor “mis”-information at all, which can have serious ramifications for crisis communication practitioners. Thirdly, the role of traditional media and other journalism/broadcasting platforms in shaping conversations is evident, as is the potential for scientific organisations’ and individual people’s Twitter user accounts. This plurality of contributors needs to be acknowledged and understood to inform crisis communication strategies.

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“…Nevertheless, we do not know how the theory of SRL is discussed on social media in general and Twitter in particular. Whereas Twitter has been found to stimulate interest in certain topics ( Han et al, 2021 ), no study reviewed Twitter to explore the SRL theory. We want to take advantage of this social media platform and offer an alternative approach to investigating and exploring SRL communication and discussion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Does Twitter Say About Self-Regulated Learning? Mapping Tweets From 2011 to 2021

Khalil

Belokrys

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Social network services such as Twitter are important venues that can be used as rich data sources to mine public opinions about various topics. In this study, we used Twitter to collect data on one of the most growing theories in education, namely Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) and carry out further analysis to investigate What Twitter says about SRL? This work uses three main analysis methods, descriptive, topic modeling, and geocoding analysis. The searched and collected dataset consists of a large volume of relevant SRL tweets equal to 54,070 tweets between 2011 and 2021. The descriptive analysis uncovers a growing discussion on SRL on Twitter from 2011 till 2018 and then markedly decreased till the collection day. For topic modeling, the text mining technique of Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) was applied and revealed insights on computationally processed topics. Finally, the geocoding analysis uncovers a diverse community from all over the world, yet a higher density representation of users from the Global North was identified. Further implications are discussed in the paper.

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Do news media and citizens have the same agenda on COVID-19? an empirical comparison of twitter posts

Cited by 38 publications

References 73 publications

Using ‘infodemics’ to understand public awareness and perception of SARS-CoV-2: A longitudinal analysis of online information about COVID-19 incidence and mortality during a major outbreak in Vietnam, July—September 2020

Using ‘infodemics’ to understand public awareness and perception of SARS-CoV-2: A longitudinal analysis of online information about COVID-19 incidence and mortality during a major outbreak in Vietnam, July—September 2020

Information sharing practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: A case study about face masks

What Does Twitter Say About Self-Regulated Learning? Mapping Tweets From 2011 to 2021

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