Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 16, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 16, 2020 - Jul 13, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 11, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Oct 13, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
The Twitter Social Mobility Index: Measuring Social Distancing Practices from Geolocated Tweets
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social distancing is an important component of the response to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Minimizing social interactions and travel reduces the rate at which the infection spreads, and "flattens the curve" such that the medical system can better treat infected individuals. However, it remains unclear how the public will respond to these policies as the pandemic continues.
Objective:
We present the Twitter Social Mobility Index, a measure of social distancing and travel derived from Twitter data. We use public geolocated Twitter data to measure how much a user travels in a given week.
Methods:
We collect 469,669,925 geotagged tweets from January 1, 2019 to April 27, 2020 in the United States. We analyze the aggregated mobility variance of a total of 3,768,959 Twitter users at the city and state level since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Results:
We find a large reduction in travel in the United States after the implementation of social distancing policies, with larger reductions in states that were early adopters and smaller changes in states without policies. Our findings are presented on http://socialmobility.covid19dataresources.org and we will continue to update our analysis during the pandemic.
Conclusions:
Geolocated tweets are an effective way to track social distancing practices from a public resource, suggesting that it can be used as part of ongoing pandemic response planning.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.