Tracking Social Media Discourse About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development of a Public Coronavirus Twitter Data Set

Chen, Emily; Lerman, Kristina; Ferrara, Emilio

doi:10.2196/19273

Cited by 610 publications

(500 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…First, we relied on the COVID-19 Twitter data set at IEEE Dataport [ 21 ], which contained COVID-19–related tweets from March 20, 2020. Second, we used a Twitter data set posted in GitHub [ 22 ] that contained COVID-19–related tweets posted since January 21, 2020. Both these data sets are publicly available and provide a list of tweet IDs for all tweets related to COVID-19.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topics, Trends, and Sentiments of Tweets About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Temporal Infoveillance Study

Ranganathan¹,

Mehta²,

Valkunde³

et al. 2020

J Med Internet Res

200

187

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Background With restrictions on movement and stay-at-home orders in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms such as Twitter have become an outlet for users to express their concerns, opinions, and feelings about the pandemic. Individuals, health agencies, and governments are using Twitter to communicate about COVID-19. Objective The aims of this study were to examine key themes and topics of English-language COVID-19–related tweets posted by individuals and to explore the trends and variations in how the COVID-19–related tweets, key topics, and associated sentiments changed over a period of time from before to after the disease was declared a pandemic. Methods Building on the emergent stream of studies examining COVID-19–related tweets in English, we performed a temporal assessment covering the time period from January 1 to May 9, 2020, and examined variations in tweet topics and sentiment scores to uncover key trends. Combining data from two publicly available COVID-19 tweet data sets with those obtained in our own search, we compiled a data set of 13.9 million English-language COVID-19–related tweets posted by individuals. We use guided latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to infer themes and topics underlying the tweets, and we used VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) sentiment analysis to compute sentiment scores and examine weekly trends for 17 weeks. Results Topic modeling yielded 26 topics, which were grouped into 10 broader themes underlying the COVID-19–related tweets. Of the 13,937,906 examined tweets, 2,858,316 (20.51%) were about the impact of COVID-19 on the economy and markets, followed by spread and growth in cases (2,154,065, 15.45%), treatment and recovery (1,831,339, 13.14%), impact on the health care sector (1,588,499, 11.40%), and governments response (1,559,591, 11.19%). Average compound sentiment scores were found to be negative throughout the examined time period for the topics of spread and growth of cases, symptoms, racism, source of the outbreak, and political impact of COVID-19. In contrast, we saw a reversal of sentiments from negative to positive for prevention, impact on the economy and markets, government response, impact on the health care industry, and treatment and recovery. Conclusions Identification of dominant themes, topics, sentiments, and changing trends in tweets about the COVID-19 pandemic can help governments, health care agencies, and policy makers frame appropriate responses to prevent and control the spread of the pandemic.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topics, Trends, and Sentiments of Tweets About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Temporal Infoveillance Study

Ranganathan¹,

Mehta²,

Valkunde³

et al. 2020

J Med Internet Res

200

187

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Globally, Twitter has grown to be an important arena also for science communication [e.g. Jahng and Lee, 2018], and particularly during the COVID-19 crisis it has provided researchers, politicians and citizens all over the world an important platform for sharing and discussing information on various aspects of the pandemic [Chen, Lerman and Ferrara, 2020]. It is used, for example, to disseminate pre-prints and early versions of COVID-19 studies as well as evaluating them.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Liberalists and data-solutionists: redefining expertise in Twitter debates on coronavirus in Finland

Väliverronen¹,

Laaksonen²,

Jauho³

et al. 2020

JCOM

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Based on recent accounts of the sociology of expertise, we analyse the public contestation and expansion of expertise in the context of COVID-19. During the epidemic, the expertise of the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), became increasingly contested. By exploring Twitter discussions concerning the actions of THL during the first months of the epidemic from January to mid-June 2020, we analyse the main motivations and arguments in this public contestation as well as the alternative forms of expertise proposed by the critics. We focus particularly on two forms of criticism arguing for what we call networked expertise: liberal crowdsourcing supporters and data-solutionists presenting alternative epidemiological models.

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“…The use of Twitter during the COVID-19 crisis has many advantages, including immediate communication between people, organizations, and governments, and the rapidity of providing information to people (Abd-Alrazaq et al, 2020;Aguilar-Gallegos et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2020b;Jimenez-Sotomayor et al, 2020;Kudchadkar & Carroll, 2020;Mackey et al, 2020;Thelwall & Levitt, 2020). Moreover, the data available on Twitter is used as a source for identifying geographical areas at risk and the outbreak of COVID-19 (Bisanzio et al, 2020;Klein et al, 2020;Mackey et al, 2020;Rufai & Bunce, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Twitter or Facebook) to build time-stamped geo-located data and communicate information regarding the details of their surroundings (Chae et al, 2014). Platforms such as Twitter are vital to the social and technological system that allows people to be connected even throughout the emergencies (Chen et al, 2020b).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Twitter During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Systematic Literature Review

Shoaei¹,

Dastani²

2020

AIP

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At the end of 2019, COVID-19 (Coronavirus 2019) emerged in Wuhan, China, and spread rapidly worldwide. The use of virtual social networks, especially Twitter, has increased due to the present condition. The purpose of the present systematic literature review is to review the investigations on Twitter's role in the COVID-19 crisis. For this purpose, an appropriate search strategy was used to extract the studies conducted in the Web of Science and PubMed databases. In the end, 24 articles were reviewed. The results indicate that in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the content and tweets posted on Twitter were affected by this crisis, and various people such as the general public, health professionals, and politicians were sharing opinions, emotions, personal experience, and educational content about exposure to COVID-19 on this social media. Therefore, the speed of providing information to people has been one of the main advantages of Twitter during the crisis of COVID-19; however, the risk of using invalid information without scientific citation is also one of the most important concerns of using Twitter among people as well as health and governmental organizations. Thus, users should evaluate information accuracy more carefully and pay attention to the quality and validity of information before employing or sharing it. Governments and professionals can also prevent this disease's contagion even in similar future crises by employing Twitter correctly in the period of crisis and using the useful experience gained from applying social networks in the outbreak of COVID-19.

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Tracking Social Media Discourse About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development of a Public Coronavirus Twitter Data Set

Cited by 610 publications

References 12 publications

Topics, Trends, and Sentiments of Tweets About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Temporal Infoveillance Study

Topics, Trends, and Sentiments of Tweets About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Temporal Infoveillance Study

Liberalists and data-solutionists: redefining expertise in Twitter debates on coronavirus in Finland

The Role of Twitter During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Systematic Literature Review

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