What Are People Concerned About During the Pandemic? Detecting Evolving Topics about COVID-19 from Twitter

Chang, Chun‐Hsiang; Monselise, Michal; Yang, Christopher C.

doi:10.1007/s41666-020-00083-3

Cited by 34 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…As news progressed about the vaccine production, social media outlets were used as a space to voice opinions about efficacy, equity, ethics, representation, and conspiracies surrounding this process [ 16 , 17 ]. Even before the pandemic, the anti-vaccination community has used social media to influence health decisions with their opinions about vaccines, and COVID-19 vaccines have not been an exception [ 18 , 19 , 20 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advocacy, Hesitancy, and Equity: Exploring U.S. Race-Related Discussions of the COVID-19 Vaccine on Twitter

Criss

Nguyen

Norton

et al. 2021

IJERPH

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Background: Our study aimed to describe themes of tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines, race, and ethnicity to explore the context of the intersection of these topics on Twitter. Methods: We utilized Twitter’s Streaming Application Programming Interface (API) to collect a random 1% sample of publicly available tweets from October 2020 to January 2021. The study team conducted a qualitative content analysis from the full data set of 1110 tweets. Results: The tweets revealed vaccine support through vaccine affirmation, advocacy through reproach, a need for a vaccine, COVID-19 and racism, vaccine development and efficacy, racist vaccine humor, and news updates. Vaccine opposition was demonstrated through direct opposition, vaccine hesitancy, and adverse reactions. Conspiracy and misinformation included scientific misinformation, political misinformation, beliefs about immunity and protective behaviors, and race extermination conspiracy. Equity and access focused on overcoming history of medical racism, pointing out health disparities, and facilitators to vaccine access. Representation touted pride in development and role models, and politics discussed the role of politics in vaccines and international politics. Conclusion: Our analysis demonstrates that Twitter can provide nuances about multiple viewpoints on the vaccine related to race and ethnicity and can be beneficial in contributing to insights for public health messaging.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advocacy, Hesitancy, and Equity: Exploring U.S. Race-Related Discussions of the COVID-19 Vaccine on Twitter

Criss

Nguyen

Norton

et al. 2021

IJERPH

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“…The participants are typically patients, caretakers, and health care professionals, who may form another layer of resistance to misinformation. Research has been active on popular social media platforms (eg, Twitter and Weibo) and COVID-19 [10][11][12][13][14][15]; however, there appears to be a gap in knowledge about how established, health-tailored communities have been responding to COVID-19. For these reasons, we will focus on a new COVID-19 community on MedHelp.org [16] for this study.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Xue et al [ 14 ] used latent Dirichlet allocation to identify popular unigrams and bigrams representative of salient topics and sentiments in the collected COVID-19 tweets, and they found that confirmed cases and death rates, preventive measures, health authorities and government policies, COVID-19 stigma, and negative psychological reactions (eg, fear) were the dominating topics on Twitter [ 14 ]. Chang et al [ 12 ] developed online non-negative matrix factorization algorithms to detect the evolving COVID-19 topics over time on Twitter; government policy, economic crisis, COVID-19-related updates and events, prevention, vaccines and treatments, and COVID-19 testing were some of the most important evolving topics identified. Zhao et al [ 15 ] explored the types of information most frequently searched by Chinese netizens during the pandemic on Weibo: accessing medical treatment, confirmatory testing, managing self-quarantine, and offline-to-online support.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Exchange of Informational Support in Online Health Communities at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Content Analysis

Jong¹,

Liang²,

Yang³

2021

JMIRx Med

Self Cite

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Background Online health communities (OHCs) provide social support for ongoing health-related problems. COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, has been an acute and substantial stressor worldwide. The disease and its impact, especially in the beginning phases, left many people with questions about the nature, treatment, and prevention of COVID-19. Unlike typical chronic ailments discussed on OHCs, which are more established, COVID-19, at least at the onset of the pandemic, is distinct in that it lacks a consensus of clinical diagnosis and an existing community foundation. Objective The study aims to investigate a newly formed OHC for COVID-19 to determine the topics and types of information exchange as well as the sources of information this community referenced during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Methods A total of 357 posts from a COVID-19 OHC on the MedHelp platform were annotated according to an open-coding process. Participants’ engagement patterns, topics of posts, and sources of information were quantified. Results Participants who offered informational support had a significantly higher percentage of responding more than once than those seeking information (P<.001). Among the information-seeking topics, symptoms and public health practice and psychological impacts were the most frequently discussed, with 26% (17/65) and 15% (10/65) of posts, respectively. Most informational support was expressed through feedback/opinion (181/220, 82.3%). Additionally, the most frequently referenced source of information was news outlets/websites, at 55% (11/20). Governmental websites were referenced less frequently. Conclusions The trends of this community could be useful in prioritizing public health responses to address the most common questions asked by the public during crisis communication and in identifying which venue of communication is most effective in reaching a public audience during such times.

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“…Additionally, user locational information enables researchers to investigate the spatiotemporal patterns of the public’s opinions and attitudes. In general, existing studies have investigated people’s reactions towards COVID-19 vaccines, with a heavy focus on the US [10-15] and also extends to other countries in the world, including China [16], South Africa [17], Australia [18], United Kingdom [19-20], Canada [21, 11], Africa [22] and to a global scale [23]. However, the study period of these works is relatively limited to or predominantly focused on the early stage of the pandemic or up to the end of 2020, without covering early 2021, the period of mass systemic vaccine implementation in many countries.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revealing public opinion towards COVID-19 vaccines with Twitter Data in the United States: a spatiotemporal perspective

Wang

Luo

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a large, initially uncontrollable, public health crisis both in the United States (US) and across the world, with experts looking to vaccines as the ultimate mechanism of defense. The development and deployment of COVID-19 vaccines have been rapidly advancing via global efforts. Hence, it is crucial for governments, public health officials, and policy makers to understand public attitudes and opinions towards vaccines, such that effective interventions and educational campaigns can be designed to promote vaccine acceptance. Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate public opinion and perception on COVID-19 vaccines by investigating the spatiotemporal trends of their sentiment and emotion towards vaccines, as well as how such trends relate to popular topics on Twitter in the US. Methods: We collected over 300,000 geotagged tweets in the US from March 1, 2020 to February 28, 2021. We examined the spatiotemporal patterns of public sentiment and emotion over time at both national and state scales and identified three phases along the pandemic timeline with the significant changes of public sentiment and emotion. We further linked the changes to eleven key events and major topics as the potential drivers to induce such changes via cloud mapping of keywords and topic modeling. Results: An increasing trend of positive sentiment in parallel with the decrease of negative sentiment are generally observed in most states, reflecting the rising confidence and anticipation of the public towards COVID-19 vaccines. The overall tendency of the eight types of emotion implies the trustiness and anticipation of the public to vaccination, accompanied by the mixture of fear, sadness and anger. Critical social/international events and/or the announcements of political leaders and authorities may have potential impacts on the public opinion on vaccines. These factors, along with important topics and manual reading of popular posts on eleven key events, help identify underlying themes and validate insights from the analysis. Conclusions: The analyses of near real-time social media big data benefit public health authorities by enabling them to monitor public attitudes and opinions towards vaccine-related information in a geo-aware manner, address the concerns of vaccine skeptics and promote the confidence of individuals within a certain region or community, towards vaccines.

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What Are People Concerned About During the Pandemic? Detecting Evolving Topics about COVID-19 from Twitter

Cited by 34 publications

References 27 publications

Advocacy, Hesitancy, and Equity: Exploring U.S. Race-Related Discussions of the COVID-19 Vaccine on Twitter

Advocacy, Hesitancy, and Equity: Exploring U.S. Race-Related Discussions of the COVID-19 Vaccine on Twitter

The Exchange of Informational Support in Online Health Communities at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Content Analysis

Revealing public opinion towards COVID-19 vaccines with Twitter Data in the United States: a spatiotemporal perspective

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