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1. The Social Amplification and Attenuation of COVID-19 Risk Perception Shaping Mask Wearing Behavior: A Longitudinal Twitter Analysis

   Suellen Hopfer, Emilia Julia ( January 2021 , PloS one)

   Introduction Twitter represents a mainstream news source for the American public, offering a valuable vehicle for learning how citizens make sense of pandemic health threats like Covid-19. Masking as a risk mitigation measure became controversial in the US. The social amplification risk framework offers insight into how a risk event interacts with psychological, social, institutional, and cultural communication processes to shape Covid-19 risk perception. Methods Qualitative content analysis was conducted on 7,024 mask tweets reflecting 6,286 users between January 24 and July 7, 2020, to identify how citizens expressed Covid-19 risk perception over time. Descriptive statistics were computed for (a) proportion of tweets using hyperlinks, (b) mentions, (c) hashtags, (d) questions, and (e) location. Results Six themes emerged regarding how mask tweets amplified and attenuated Covid-19 risk: (a) severity perceptions (18.0%) steadily increased across 5 months; (b) mask effectiveness debates (10.7%) persisted; (c) who is at risk (26.4%) peaked in April and May 2020; (d) mask guidelines (15.6%) peaked April 3, 2020, with federal guidelines; (e) political legitimizing of Covid-19 risk (18.3%) steadily increased; and (f) mask behavior of others (31.6%) composed the largest discussion category and increased over time. Of tweets, 45% contained a hyperlink, 40% contained mentions, 33%more »contained hashtags, and 16.5% were expressed as a question. Conclusions Users ascribed many meanings to mask wearing in the social media information environment revealing that COVID-19 risk was expressed in a more expanded range than objective risk. The simultaneous amplification and attenuation of COVID-19 risk perception on social media complicates public health messaging about mask wearing.« less
2. The social amplification and attenuation of COVID-19 risk perception shaping mask wearing behavior: A longitudinal twitter analysis

   https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0257428  

   Hopfer, S ; Fields, EJ ; Lu, Y ; Ramakrishnan, G ; Grover, T ; Bai, Q ; Huang, Y ; Li, C: Mark ( September 2021 , PloS one)

   Introduction Twitter represents a mainstream news source for the American public, offering a valuable vehicle for learning how citizens make sense of pandemic health threats like Covid-19. Masking as a risk mitigation measure became controversial in the US. The social amplifica- tion risk framework offers insight into how a risk event interacts with psychological, social, institutional, and cultural communication processes to shape Covid-19 risk perception. Methods Qualitative content analysis was conducted on 7,024 mask tweets reflecting 6,286 users between January 24 and July 7, 2020, to identify how citizens expressed Covid-19 risk per- ception over time. Descriptive statistics were computed for (a) proportion of tweets using hyperlinks, (b) mentions, (c) hashtags, (d) questions, and (e) location. Results Six themes emerged regarding how mask tweets amplified and attenuated Covid-19 risk: (a) severity perceptions (18.0%) steadily increased across 5 months; (b) mask effectiveness debates (10.7%) persisted; (c) who is at risk (26.4%) peaked in April and May 2020; (d) mask guidelines (15.6%) peaked April 3, 2020, with federal guidelines; (e) political legitimiz- ing of Covid-19 risk (18.3%) steadily increased; and (f) mask behavior of others (31.6%) composed the largest discussion category and increased over time. Of tweets, 45% con- tained a hyperlink,more »40% contained mentions, 33% contained hashtags, and 16.5% were expressed as a question. Conclusions Users ascribed many meanings to mask wearing in the social media information environ- ment revealing that COVID-19 risk was expressed in a more expanded range than objective risk. The simultaneous amplification and attenuation of COVID-19 risk perception on social media complicates public health messaging about mask wearing.« less
3. Data-driven inferences of agency-level risk and response communication on COVID-19 through social media-based interactions

   https://doi.org/10.5055/jem.0589  

   Ahmed, PhD Candidate ; Sadri, PhD ; Amini, PhD ( October 2021 , Journal of Emergency Management)

   Risk perception and risk averting behaviors of public agencies in the emergence and spread of COVID-19 can be retrieved through online social media (Twitter), and such interactions can be echoed in other information outlets. This study collected time-sensitive online social media data and analyzed patterns of health risk communication of public health and emergency agencies in the emergence and spread of novel coronavirus using data-driven methods. The major focus is toward understanding how policy-making agencies communicate risk and response information through social media during a pandemic and influence community response—ie, timing of lockdown, timing of reopening, etc.—and disease outbreak indicators—ie, number of confirmed cases and number of deaths. Twitter data of six major public organizations (1,000-4,500 tweets per organization) are collected from February 21, 2020 to June 6, 2020. Several machine learning algorithms, including dynamic topic model and sentiment analysis, are applied over time to identify the topic dynamics over the specific timeline of the pandemic. Organizations emphasized on various topics—eg, importance of wearing face mask, home quarantine, understanding the symptoms, social distancing and contact tracing, emerging community transmission, lack of personal protective equipment, COVID-19 testing and medical supplies, effect of tobacco, pandemic stress management, increasing hospitalization rate, upcoming hurricanemore »season, use of convalescent plasma for COVID-19 treatment, maintaining hygiene, and the role of healthcare podcast in different timeline. The findings can benefit emergency management, policymakers, and public health agencies to identify targeted information dissemination policies for public with diverse needs based on how local, federal, and international agencies reacted to COVID-19.« less
4. Topics and Sentiments of Public Concerns Regarding COVID-19 Vaccines: Social Media Trend Analysis

   https://doi.org/10.2196/30765  

   Monselise, Michal ; Chang, Chia-Hsuan ; Ferreira, Gustavo ; Yang, Rita ; Yang, Christopher C ( January 2021 , Journal of Medical Internet Research)

   Background As a number of vaccines for COVID-19 are given emergency use authorization by local health agencies and are being administered in multiple countries, it is crucial to gain public trust in these vaccines to ensure herd immunity through vaccination. One way to gauge public sentiment regarding vaccines for the goal of increasing vaccination rates is by analyzing social media such as Twitter. Objective The goal of this research was to understand public sentiment toward COVID-19 vaccines by analyzing discussions about the vaccines on social media for a period of 60 days when the vaccines were started in the United States. Using the combination of topic detection and sentiment analysis, we identified different types of concerns regarding vaccines that were expressed by different groups of the public on social media. Methods To better understand public sentiment, we collected tweets for exactly 60 days starting from December 16, 2020 that contained hashtags or keywords related to COVID-19 vaccines. We detected and analyzed different topics of discussion of these tweets as well as their emotional content. Vaccine topics were identified by nonnegative matrix factorization, and emotional content was identified using the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner sentiment analysis library as wellmore »as by using sentence bidirectional encoder representations from transformer embeddings and comparing the embedding to different emotions using cosine similarity. Results After removing all duplicates and retweets, 7,948,886 tweets were collected during the 60-day time period. Topic modeling resulted in 50 topics; of those, we selected 12 topics with the highest volume of tweets for analysis. Administration and access to vaccines were some of the major concerns of the public. Additionally, we classified the tweets in each topic into 1 of the 5 emotions and found fear to be the leading emotion in the tweets, followed by joy. Conclusions This research focused not only on negative emotions that may have led to vaccine hesitancy but also on positive emotions toward the vaccine. By identifying both positive and negative emotions, we were able to identify the public's response to the vaccines overall and to news events related to the vaccines. These results are useful for developing plans for disseminating authoritative health information and for better communication to build understanding and trust.« less
5. #WashTheHate: Understanding the Prevalence of Anti-Asian Prejudice on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

   Wheeler, B. ; Jung, S. ; Nardini-Barioni, M. C. ; Purohit, M. ; Hall, D. L. ; Silva, Y. N. ( January 2022 , The 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM))

   Prejudice and hate directed toward Asian individuals has increased in prevalence and salience during the COVID-19 pandemic, with notable rises in physical violence. Concurrently, as many governments enacted stay-at-home mandates, the spread of anti-Asian content increased in online spaces, including social media. In the present study, we investigated temporal and geographical patterns in social media content relevant to anti-Asian prejudice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the Twitter Data Collection API, we queried over 13 million tweets posted between January 30, 2020, and April 30, 2021, for both negative (e.g., #kungflu) and positive (e.g., #stopAAPIhate) hashtags and keywords related to anti-Asian prejudice. In a series of descriptive analyses, we found differences in the frequency of negative and positive keywords based on geographic location. Using burst detection, we also identified distinct increases in negative and positive content in relation to key political tweets and events. These largely exploratory analyses shed light on the role of social media in the expression and proliferation of prejudice as well as positive responses online.