Unmasking twitter discourse: an infodemiology study of covid-19 mitigation practices

ABSTRACT

Social media is emerging as a useful tool in tracking public health concerns and provides timely insights into how individuals understand and respond to public health threats. Almost 85 million tweets containing the keyword ‘coronavirus’ were examined to uncover the predominantly discussed Covid mitigating practices and their association with CDC-related tweets. When Twitter users retweeted the CDC regarding mitigation practices, an overwhelming number focused on the mask category, and there was a strong correlation between tweets about masks in the overall dataset and CDC tweets about masks. Qualitative analysis of a subset of 1200 mask-related tweets unveiled that Twitter was used to: 1) share information about masks, 2) express opinions, 3) highlight profiting during Covid, and 4) describe efforts to promote masking. This study can contribute to our understanding of public perceptions and augment the use of Twitter by public health professionals to limit infections and save lives in future pandemics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data is available at: https://github.com/DrMassie/Covid_tweets/tree/main

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Kutztown University’s Internal Research Grant 2021.