The Role of Twitter During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

At the end of 2019, COVID-19 (Coronavirus 2019) emerged in Wuhan, China, and spread rapidly worldwide. The use of virtual social networks, especially Twitter, has increased due to the present condition. The purpose of the present systematic literature review is to review the investigations on Twitter's role in the COVID-19 crisis. For this purpose, an appropriate search strategy was used to extract the studies conducted in the Web of Science and PubMed databases. In the end, 24 articles were reviewed. The results indicate that in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the content and tweets posted on Twitter were affected by this crisis, and various people such as the general public, health professionals, and politicians were sharing opinions, emotions, personal experience, and educational content about exposure to COVID-19 on this social media. Therefore, the speed of providing information to people has been one of the main advantages of Twitter during the crisis of COVID-19; however, the risk of using invalid information without scientific citation is also one of the most important concerns of using Twitter among people as well as health and governmental organizations. Thus, users should evaluate information accuracy more carefully and pay attention to the quality and validity of information before employing or sharing it. Governments and professionals can also prevent this disease's contagion even in similar future crises by employing Twitter correctly in the period of crisis and using the useful experience gained from applying social networks in the outbreak of COVID-19.

Topics and Users' Emotions on Social Media Regarding the COVID-19 Vaccine: A Systematic Review

“…The emotional use of social media such as Twitter to share information may cause a considerable challenge for people's health and ongoing efforts to fight the spread of this disease since it may make this information incorrect and part of conspiracy theories (6). Such theories affect people's way of thinking about vaccination and raise doubts about vaccination (9) because people rely on social media to receive up-todate information in times of crisis (46). In addition, inaccurate information and conspiratorial content can create stronger anti-vaccine beliefs and provoke emotions and changes in people's health behaviors since users fail to pay attention to the validity of the contents.…”

Social Networks of COVID-19 in South Korea

“…Therefore, many people, such as policymakers, health professionals, politicians, and citizens, are sharing their information, opinions, emotions, personal experience, and content about exposure to COVID-19 on social media and social network services (see e.g. Dalili Shoaei and Dastani, 2020 ).…”

Perception of COVID-19 vaccination among Indian Twitter users: computational approach

“…A study on content analysis on Twitter messages also identified the same that acceptance towards COVID-19 vaccine varies across different countries [ 26 ]. At the time of pandemic, social media was used as a tool to understand people opinions and emotions towards outbreak situation and COVID-19 vaccine [ 7 ]. Twitter stands out among social media platforms as a special big data source for public health researchers due to its real-time nature of the data, user-centric content which reflects a high number of users, and the simplicity of accessing and reviewing publicly available information (albeit subject to legal restrictions on redistribution) [ 27 ].…”

“…At the time of COVID-19 pandemic, when travel restriction were imposed, people extensively used social media as a public discussion forum to share their opinions on the outbreak [ 6 ]. Not only general public, other people such as health professionals, celebrities and political leaders used Twitter as a health dissemination media by sharing views, authorized information and also personal experiences towards pandemic, as information reaches a wider people within a short duration[ 7 ]. But there are also evidences of misinformation or unauthorized information about COVID-19 being shared in Twitter [ 8 , 9 ].…”