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Register a new userRisk Communication in Asian Countries: COVID-19 Discourse on Twitter
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Added by
Sungkyu Park
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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COVID-19 has become one of the most widely talked about topics on social media. This research characterizes risk communication patterns by analyzing the public discourse on the novel coronavirus from four Asian countries: South Korea, Iran, Vietnam, and India, which suffered the outbreak to different degrees. The temporal analysis shows that the official epidemic phases issued by governments do not match well with the online attention on COVID-19. This finding calls for a need to analyze the public discourse by new measures, such as topical dynamics. Here, we propose an automatic method to detect topical phase transitions and compare similarities in major topics across these countries over time. We examine the time lag difference between social media attention and confirmed patient counts. For dynamics, we find an inverse relationship between the tweet count and topical diversity.
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Successful navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic is predicated on public cooperation with safety measures and appropriate perception of risk, in which emotion and attention play important roles. Signatures of public emotion and attention are present in social media data, thus natural language analysis of this text enables near-to-real-time monitoring of indicators of public risk perception. We compare key epidemiological indicators of the progression of the pandemic with indicators of the public perception of the pandemic constructed from ~20 million unique Covid-19-related tweets from 12 countries posted between 10th March -- 14th June 2020. We find evidence of psychophysical numbing: Twitter users increasingly fixate on mortality, but in a decreasingly emotional and increasingly analytic tone. Semantic network analysis based on word co-occurrences reveals changes in the emotional framing of Covid-19 casualties that are consistent with this hypothesis. We also find that the average attention afforded to national Covid-19 mortality rates is modelled accurately with the Weber-Fechner and power law functions of sensory perception. Our parameter estimates for these models are consistent with estimates from psychological experiments, and indicate that users in this dataset exhibit differential sensitivity by country to the national Covid-19 death rates. Our work illustrates the potential utility of social media for monitoring public risk perception and guiding public communication during crisis scenarios.
We investigate predictors of anti-Asian hate among Twitter users throughout COVID-19. With the rise of xenophobia and polarization that has accompanied widespread social media usage in many nations, online hate has become a major social issue, attracting many researchers. Here, we apply natural language processing techniques to characterize social media users who began to post anti-Asian hate messages during COVID-19. We compare two user groups -- those who posted anti-Asian slurs and those who did not -- with respect to a rich set of features measured with data prior to COVID-19 and show that it is possible to predict who later publicly posted anti-Asian slurs. Our analysis of predictive features underlines the potential impact of news media and information sources that report on online hate and calls for further investigation into the role of polarized communication networks and news media.
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has significantly altered our lifestyles as we resort to minimize the spread through preventive measures such as social distancing and quarantine. An increasingly worrying aspect is the gap between the exponential disease spread and the delay in adopting preventive measures. This gap is attributed to the lack of awareness about the disease and its preventive measures. Nowadays, social media platforms (ie., Twitter) are frequently used to create awareness about major events, including COVID-19. In this paper, we use Twitter to characterize public awareness regarding COVID-19 by analyzing the information flow in the most affected countries. Towards that, we collect more than 46K trends and 622 Million tweets from the top twenty most affected countries to examine 1) the temporal evolution of COVID-19 related trends, 2) the volume of tweets and recurring topics in those trends, and 3) the user sentiment towards preventive measures. Our results show that countries with a lower pandemic spread generated a higher volume of trends and tweets to expedite the information flow and contribute to public awareness. We also observed that in those countries, the COVID-19 related trends were generated before the sharp increase in the number of cases, indicating a preemptive attempt to notify users about the potential threat. Finally, we noticed that in countries with a lower spread, users had a positive sentiment towards COVID-19 preventive measures. Our measurements and analysis show that effective social media usage can influence public behavior, which can be leveraged to better combat future pandemics.
The outbreak of COVID-19 highlights the need for a more harmonized, less privacy-concerning, easily accessible approach to monitoring the human mobility that has been proved to be associated with the viral transmission. In this study, we analyzed 587 million tweets worldwide to see how global collaborative efforts in reducing human mobility are reflected from the user-generated information at the global, country, and the U.S. state scale. Considering the multifaceted nature of mobility, we propose two types of distance: the single-day distance and the cross-day distance. To quantify the responsiveness in certain geographical regions, we further propose a mobility-based responsive index (MRI) that captures the overall degree of mobility changes within a time window. The results suggest that mobility patterns obtained from Twitter data are amendable to quantitatively reflect the mobility dynamics. Globally, the proposed two distances had greatly deviated from their baselines after March 11, 2020, when WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic. The considerably less periodicity after the declaration suggests that the protection measures have obviously affected peoples travel routines. The country scale comparisons reveal the discrepancies in responsiveness, evidenced by the contrasting mobility patterns in different epidemic phases. We find that the triggers of mobility changes correspond well with the national announcements of mitigation measures. In the U.S., the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on mobility is distinct. However, the impacts varied substantially among states. The strong mobility recovering momentum is further fueled by the Black Lives Matter protests, potentially fostering the second wave of infections in the U.S.
One of the new scientific ways of understanding discourse dynamics is analyzing the public data of social networks. This researchs aim is Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis (PDA) of Covid-19 phenomenon (inspired by Laclau and Mouffes Discourse Theory) by using Intelligent Data Mining for Persian Society. The examined big data is five million tweets from 160,000 users of the Persian Twitter network to compare two discourses. Besides analyzing the tweet texts individually, a social network graph database has been created based on retweets relationships. We use the VoteRank algorithm to introduce and rank people whose posts become word of mouth, provided that the total information spreading scope is maximized over the network. These users are also clustered according to their word usage pattern (the Gaussian Mixture Model is used). The constructed discourse of influential spreaders is compared to the most active users. This analysis is done based on Covid-related posts over eight episodes. Also, by relying on the statistical content analysis and polarity of tweet words, discourse analysis is done for the whole mentioned subpopulations, especially for the top individuals. The most important result of this research is that the Twitter subjects discourse construction is government-based rather than community-based. The analyzed Iranian society does not consider itself responsible for the Covid-19 wicked problem, does not believe in participation, and expects the government to solve all problems. The most active and most influential users similarity is that political, national, and critical discourse construction is the predominant one. In addition to the advantages of its research methodology, it is necessary to pay attention to the studys limitations. Suggestion for future encounters of Iranian society with similar crises is given.
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