Collective response to the media coverage of COVID-19 Pandemic on Reddit and Wikipedia

Abstract

The exposure and consumption of information during epidemic outbreaks may alter risk perception, trigger behavioural changes, and ultimately affect the evolution of the disease. It is thus of the uttermost importance to map information dissemination by mainstream media outlets and public response. However, our understanding of this exposure-response dynamic during COVID-19 pandemic is still limited. In this paper, we provide a characterization of media coverage and online collective attention to COVID-19 pandemic in four countries: Italy, United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. For this purpose, we collect an heterogeneous dataset including 227, 768 online news articles and 13, 448 Youtube videos published by mainstream media, 107, 898 users posts and 3, 829, 309 comments on the social media platform Reddit, and 278, 456, 892 views to COVID-19 related Wikipedia pages. Our results show that public attention, quantified as users activity on Reddit and active searches on Wikipedia pages, is mainly driven by media coverage and declines rapidly, while news exposure and COVID-19 incidence remain high. Furthermore, by using an unsupervised, dynamical topic modeling approach, we show that while the attention dedicated to different topics by media and online users are in good accordance, interesting deviations emerge in their temporal patterns. Overall, our findings offer an additional key to interpret public perception/response to the current global health emergency and raise questions about the effects of attention saturation on collective awareness, risk perception and thus on tendencies towards behavioural changes.

Social discourse and reopening after COVID-19

“…This means that social discourse about the reopening was never dominated by a single positive or negative emotion, like trust or fear. The reopening was rather perceived as a nuanced topic of discourse, where positive and negative emotional texts co-existed together, in agreement with other studies (Lima, et al, 2020;Gozzi, et al, 2020;. Figure 2 indicates that sentiment mostly remains stationary over time whereas emotional richness shows more complicated dynamics, with peaks and deviations.…”

“…Announcements of local COVID-19 outbreaks altered the perception of "quaranten" (quarantine), which was previously perceived as successful in reducing contagion. Trust vanished and was replaced with a sad perception of quarantine, related to sudden, local outbreaks (see also Gozzi, et al, 2020). Italians displayed also an unwavering trust in politics and the government across the whole considered time window.…”

“…This extraction relies on a fundamental assumption: text production and therefore social media both open a window into people's minds (Aitchison, 2012;Ferrara and Yang, 2015). Under a time of crisis, like during a pandemic, being capable of seeing through such window is fundamental for understanding how large audiences are coping with the emergency (Bonaccorsi, et al, 2020;Gallotti, et al, 2020;Gozzi, et al, 2020). This challenge requires tools that provide a transparent representation of knowledge and emotions as expressed in social discourse.…”

Volunteer contributions to Wikipedia increased during COVID-19 mobility restrictions

“…The results support the previous findings and confirm that the reported edit volume increase is not due to COVID-19 articles. In this way, our work extends previous studies, which focused on a smaller subset of pandemic-related articles [19,27]. Other limitations.…”

“…Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and the "infodemic" [15] that ensued, Wikipedia played and continues to play an important role in supplying information about the COVID-19 crisis [9,19,45,46]. Notably, the increase in access related to all kinds of articles-not only those related to the pandemic-suggests that Wikipedia's role in this time of crisis transcends mere COVID-19-related information seeking [24].…”