JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The spread of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 across Asia and Europe sparked a huge increase in public interest and media coverage, including social media platforms such as Twitter. In this context, the origin of information plays a central role in the dissemination of evidence-based information about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the associated COVID-19 disease. On 2nd February 2020, the WHO constituted a “massive infodemic” and argued that this situation “makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.”

Objective:

This infoveillance study, conducted during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, focuses on the social media platform Twitter. The platform allows to monitor the dynamic, pandemic situation on a global scale for: different aspects and topics, languages, as well as regions and even whole countries. Of particular interest are temporal and geographical variations of COVID-19-related information, the situation in Europe and the categories and origin of shared external resources in COVID-19-related tweets.

Methods:

Twitter’s Streaming API was used to filter tweets based on sixteen prevalent hashtags related to the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Each tweet’s text and corresponding metadata, as well as the user’s profile information were extracted and stored into a PostgreSQL database. Metadata included links to external resources as referenced by a Twitter account. A link categorization scheme was leveraged according to a study conducted by Chew and Eysenbach in 2009. The study applied this scheme onto the Top 250 shared domains to analyze the relative proportion for each category. Moreover, temporal variations of global tweet volumes were analyzed and a specific analysis was conducted for the European region.

Results:

Between 9th February and 11th April 2020, a total of 21,755,802 distinct tweets were collected, posted by 4,809,842 distinct Twitter accounts. The volume of #covid19 related tweets increased after the WHO announced the name of the new disease on 11th February 2020 and stabilized at the end of March at a high level. For the regional analysis, a higher tweet volume was observed in the vicinity of major European capitals, or in densely populated areas. The most frequently shared resources originated from various social media platforms and were represented by the ranks 1-7. The most prevalent category in the Top 50 was “Mainstream or Local News”. For the category “Government or Public Health”, only two information sources were found in the Top 50: CDC (U.S.) on rank 25, and the WHO on rank 27. The first occurrence of a prevalent scientific source was Nature on rank 116.

Conclusions:

The naming of the disease by the WHO was a major signal to address the public audience with public health response via social media platforms, ie Twitter. Future studies should focus on the origin and trustworthiness of shared resources, as monitoring the spread of fake news during a pandemic situation is of particular importance. In addition, it would be beneficial to analyze and uncover bot networks spreading COVID-19-related misinformation.