How do sentiments affect virality on Twitter?
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Jimenez-Zafra SM
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8059576 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundWith the World Health Organization's pandemic declaration and government-initiated actions against coronavirus disease (COVID-19), sentiments surrounding COVID-19 have evolved rapidly.ObjectiveThis study aimed to examine worldwide trends of four emotions-fear, anger, sadness, and joy-and the narratives underlying those emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsOver 20 million social media twitter posts made during the early phases of the COVID-19 outbreak from January 28 to April 9, 2020, were collected using "wuhan," "corona," "nCov," and "covid" as search keywords.ResultsPublic emotions shifted strongly from fear to anger over the course of the pandemic, while sadness and joy also surfaced. Findings from word clouds suggest that fears around shortages of COVID-19 tests and medical supplies became increasingly widespread discussion points. Anger shifted from xenophobia at the beginning of the pandemic to discourse around the stay-at-home notices. Sadness was highlighted by the topics of losing friends and family members, while topics related to joy included words of gratitude and good health.ConclusionsOverall, global COVID-19 sentiments have shown rapid evolutions within just the span of a few weeks. Findings suggest that emotion-driven collective issues around shared public distress experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic are developing and include large-scale social isolation and the loss of human lives. The steady rise of societal concerns indicated by negative emotions needs to be monitored and controlled by complementing regular crisis communication with strategic public health communication that aims to balance public psychological wellbeing.
| S-EPMC7247466 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveWe identified public sentiments and opinions toward the COVID-19 vaccines based on the content of Twitter.Materials and methodsWe retrieved 4,552,652 publicly available tweets posted within the timeline of January 2020 to January 2021. Following extraction, we identified vaccine sentiments and opinions of tweets and compared their progression by time, geographical distribution, main themes, keywords, posts engagement metrics and accounts characteristics.ResultsWe found a slight difference in the prevalence of positive and negative sentiments, with positive being the dominant polarity and having higher engagements. The amount of discussion on vaccine rejection and hesitancy was more than interest in vaccines during the course of the study, but the pattern was different in various countries. We found the accounts producing vaccine opposition content were partly Twitter bots or political activists while well-known individuals and organizations generated the content in favour of vaccination.ConclusionUnderstanding sentiments and opinions toward vaccination using Twitter may help public health agencies to increase positive messaging and eliminate opposing messages in order to enhance vaccine uptake.
| S-EPMC8157498 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:There are documented differences in access to health care across the United States. Previous research indicates that Web-based data regarding patient experiences and opinions of health care are available from Twitter. Sentiment analyses of Twitter data can be used to examine differences in patient views of health care across the United States. OBJECTIVE:The objective of our study was to provide a characterization of patient experience sentiments across the United States on Twitter over a 4-year period. METHODS:Using data from Twitter, we developed a set of 4 software components to automatically label and examine a database of tweets discussing patient experience. The set includes a classifier to determine patient experience tweets, a geolocation inference engine for social data, a modified sentiment classifier, and an engine to determine if the tweet is from a metropolitan or nonmetropolitan area in the United States. Using the information retrieved, we conducted spatial and temporal examinations of tweet sentiments at national and regional levels. We examined trends in the time of the day and that of the week when tweets were posted. Statistical analyses were conducted to determine if any differences existed between the discussions of patient experience in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. RESULTS:We collected 27.3 million tweets between February 1, 2013 and February 28, 2017, using a set of patient experience-related keywords; the classifier was able to identify 2,759,257 tweets labeled as patient experience. We identified the approximate location of 31.76% (876,384/2,759,257) patient experience tweets using a geolocation classifier to conduct spatial analyses. At the national level, we observed 27.83% (243,903/876,384) positive patient experience tweets, 36.22% (317,445/876,384) neutral patient experience tweets, and 35.95% (315,036/876,384) negative patient experience tweets. There were slight differences in tweet sentiments across all regions of the United States during the 4-year study period. We found the average sentiment polarity shifted toward less negative over the study period across all the regions of the United States. We observed the sentiment of tweets to have a lower negative fraction during daytime hours, whereas the sentiment of tweets posted between 8 pm and 10 am had a higher negative fraction. Nationally, sentiment scores for tweets in metropolitan areas were found to be more extremely negative and mildly positive compared with tweets in nonmetropolitan areas. This result is statistically significant (P<.001). Tweets with extremely negative sentiments had a medium effect size (d=0.34) at the national level. CONCLUSIONS:This study presents methodologies for a deeper understanding of Web-based discussion related to patient experience across space and time and demonstrates how Twitter can provide a unique and unsolicited perspective from users on the health care they receive in the United States.
| S-EPMC6231860 | biostudies-other
Project description:BackgroundSince the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019, its far-reaching impacts have been witnessed globally across all aspects of human life, such as health, economy, politics, and education. Such widely penetrating impacts cast significant and profound burdens on all population groups, incurring varied concerns and sentiments among them.ObjectiveThis study aims to identify the concerns, sentiments, and disparities of various population groups during the COVID-19 pandemic through a cross-sectional study conducted via large-scale Twitter data mining infoveillance.MethodsThis study consisted of three steps: first, tweets posted during the pandemic were collected and preprocessed on a large scale; second, the key population attributes, concerns, sentiments, and emotions were extracted via a collection of natural language processing procedures; third, multiple analyses were conducted to reveal concerns, sentiments, and disparities among population groups during the pandemic. Overall, this study implemented a quick, effective, and economical approach for analyzing population-level disparities during a public health event. The source code developed in this study was released for free public use at GitHub.ResultsA total of 1,015,655 original English tweets posted from August 7 to 12, 2020, were acquired and analyzed to obtain the following results. Organizations were significantly more concerned about COVID-19 (odds ratio [OR] 3.48, 95% CI 3.39-3.58) and expressed more fear and depression emotions than individuals. Females were less concerned about COVID-19 (OR 0.73, 95% CI 0.71-0.75) and expressed less fear and depression emotions than males. Among all age groups (ie, ≤18, 19-29, 30-39, and ≥40 years of age), the attention ORs of COVID-19 fear and depression increased significantly with age. It is worth noting that not all females paid less attention to COVID-19 than males. In the age group of 40 years or older, females were more concerned than males, especially regarding the economic and education topics. In addition, males 40 years or older and 18 years or younger were the least positive. Lastly, in all sentiment analyses, the sentiment polarities regarding political topics were always the lowest among the five topics of concern across all population groups.ConclusionsThrough large-scale Twitter data mining, this study revealed that meaningful differences regarding concerns and sentiments about COVID-19-related topics existed among population groups during the study period. Therefore, specialized and varied attention and support are needed for different population groups. In addition, the efficient analysis method implemented by our publicly released code can be utilized to dynamically track the evolution of each population group during the pandemic or any other major event for better informed public health research and interventions.
| S-EPMC7939057 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A growing body of evidence shows that humans are remarkably altruistic primates. Food sharing and division of labor play an important role in all human societies, and cooperation extends beyond the bounds of close kinship and networks of reciprocating partners. In humans, altruism is motivated at least in part by empathy and concern for the welfare of others. Although altruistic behavior is well-documented in other primates, the range of altruistic behaviors in other primate species, including the great apes, is much more limited than it is in humans. Moreover, when altruism does occur among other primates, it is typically limited to familiar group members--close kin, mates, and reciprocating partners. This suggests that there may be fundamental differences in the social preferences that motivate altruism across the primate order, and there is currently considerable interest in how we came to be such unusual apes. A body of experimental studies designed to examine the phylogenetic range of prosocial sentiments and behavior is beginning to shed some light on this issue. In experimental settings, chimpanzees and tamarins do not consistently take advantage of opportunities to deliver food rewards to others, although capuchins and marmosets do deliver food rewards to others in similar kinds of tasks. Although chimpanzees do not satisfy experimental criteria for prosociality in food delivery tasks, they help others complete tasks to obtain a goal. Differences in performance across species and differences in performance across tasks are not yet fully understood and raise new questions for further study.
| S-EPMC3131813 | biostudies-other
Project description:Two code files and one dataset related to Olympic Twitter activity are the foundation for this article. Through Twitter's Spritzer streaming API (Application Programming Interface), we collected over 430 million tweets from May 12th, 2016 to September 12th, 2016 windowing the Rio de Janeiro Olympics and Paralympics. We cleaned and filtered these tweets to contain Olympic-related content. We then analyzed the raw data of 21,218,652 tweets including location data, language, and tweet content to distill the sentiment and emotions of Twitter users pertaining to the Olympic Games Kassens-Noor E. et al., 2019. We generalized the original data set to comply with the Twitter's Terms of Service and Developer agreement, 2018. We present the modified dataset and accompanying code files in this article to suggest using both for further analysis on sentiment and emotions related to the Rio de Janeiro Olympics and for comparative research on imagery and perceptions of other Olympic Games.
| S-EPMC6468189 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Medical cryopreservation is the speculative practice of using low temperatures and medical-grade cryoprotective agents to halt the decay of a recently-deceased person's brain and body for the prospect of future resuscitation and restoration of function. We conducted a survey of 1,487 internet users in the United States to measure familiarity with, interest in, beliefs about, and attitudes towards cryopreservation. The majority of respondents (75%) had previously heard of the topic. Respondents tended to underestimate the cost of cryopreservation and number of previous cases but overestimate the number of providers. While many respondents expressed interest in signing up (20%) or had actively researched the topic (21%), a much smaller fraction have decided to be cryopreserved (6%). This level of interest is much greater than the number of previous preservation cases would indicate. We found that respondents' attitudes towards death significantly correlated with their general sentiments towards the topic, with those expressing a desire for longer life or to see the future being more interested and positively inclined. Fear of death was not associated with interest in cryopreservation. Negative sentiments towards cryopreservation were less common than respondents perceived. For example, 14% of respondents believed that "most people" think cryopreservation should be illegal, but only 4% of respondents actually did. Many respondents (42%) were pessimistic regarding the likelihood of cryopreservation being successful, but the mean estimate of time until revival of cryopreserved bodies would be possible was 82 years.
| S-EPMC7790260 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic led to substantial public discussion. Understanding these discussions can help institutions, governments, and individuals navigate the pandemic.ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to analyze discussions on Twitter related to COVID-19 and to investigate the sentiments toward COVID-19.MethodsThis study applied machine learning methods in the field of artificial intelligence to analyze data collected from Twitter. Using tweets originating exclusively in the United States and written in English during the 1-month period from March 20 to April 19, 2020, the study examined COVID-19-related discussions. Social network and sentiment analyses were also conducted to determine the social network of dominant topics and whether the tweets expressed positive, neutral, or negative sentiments. Geographic analysis of the tweets was also conducted.ResultsThere were a total of 14,180,603 likes, 863,411 replies, 3,087,812 retweets, and 641,381 mentions in tweets during the study timeframe. Out of 902,138 tweets analyzed, sentiment analysis classified 434,254 (48.2%) tweets as having a positive sentiment, 187,042 (20.7%) as neutral, and 280,842 (31.1%) as negative. The study identified 5 dominant themes among COVID-19-related tweets: health care environment, emotional support, business economy, social change, and psychological stress. Alaska, Wyoming, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Florida were the states expressing the most negative sentiment while Vermont, North Dakota, Utah, Colorado, Tennessee, and North Carolina conveyed the most positive sentiment.ConclusionsThis study identified 5 prevalent themes of COVID-19 discussion with sentiments ranging from positive to negative. These themes and sentiments can clarify the public's response to COVID-19 and help officials navigate the pandemic.
| S-EPMC7438102 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This article introduces the Twitter Parliamentarian Database (TPD), a multi-source and manually validated database of parliamentarians on Twitter. The TPD includes parliamentarians from all European Free Trade Association countries where over 45% of parliamentarians are on Twitter as well as a selection of English-speaking countries. The database is designed to move beyond the one-off nature of most Twitter-based research and in the direction of systematic and rigorous comparative and transnational analysis. The TPD incorporates, in addition to data collected through Twitter's streaming API and governmental websites, data from the Manifesto Project Database; the Electoral System Design Database; the ParlGov database; and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. By compiling these different data sources it becomes possible to compare different countries, political parties, political party families, and different kinds of democracies. To illustrate the opportunities for comparative and transnational analysis that the TPD opens up, we ask: What are the differences between countries in parliamentarian Twitter interactions? How do political parties differ in their use of hashtags and what is their common ground? What is the structure of interaction between parliamentarians in the transnational debate? Alongside some interesting similarities, we find striking cross-party and particularly cross-national differences in how parliamentarians engage in politics on the social media platform.
| S-EPMC7494116 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundElectronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) have been widely promoted on the internet, and subsequently, social media has been used as an important informative platform by e-cigarette users. Beliefs and knowledge expressed on social media platforms have largely influenced e-cigarette uptake, the decision to switch from conventional smoking to e-cigarette smoking, and positive and negative connotations associated with e-cigarettes. Despite this, there is a gap in our knowledge of people's perceptions and sentiments on e-cigarettes as depicted on social media platforms.ObjectiveThis study aimed to (1) provide an overview of studies examining the perceptions and sentiments associated with e-cigarettes on social media platforms and online discussion forums, (2) explore people's perceptions of e-cigarette therein, and (3) examine the methodological limitations and gaps of the included studies.MethodsSearches in major electronic databases, including PubMed, Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, EMBASE, Web of Science, and Communication and Mass Media Complete, were conducted using the following search terms: "electronic cigarette," "electronic vaporizer," "electronic nicotine," and "electronic nicotine delivery systems" combined with "internet," "social media," and "internet use." The studies were selected if they examined participants' perceptions and sentiments of e-cigarettes on online forums or social media platforms during the 2007-2017 period.ResultsA total of 21 articles were included. A total of 20 different social media platforms and online discussion forums were identified. A real-time snapshot and characteristics of sentiments, personal experience, and perceptions toward e-cigarettes on social media platforms and online forums were identified. Common topics regarding e-cigarettes included positive and negative health effects, testimony by current users, potential risks, benefits, regulations associated with e-cigarettes, and attitude toward them as smoking cessation aids.ConclusionsAlthough perceptions among social media users were mixed, there were more positive sentiments expressed than negative ones. This study particularly adds to our understanding of current trends in the popularity of and attitude toward e-cigarettes among social media users. In addition, this study identified conflicting perceptions about e-cigarettes among social media users. This suggests that accurate and up-to-date information on the benefits and risks of e-cigarettes needs to be disseminated to current and potential e-cigarette users via social media platforms, which can serve as important educational channels. Future research can explore the efficacy of social media-based interventions that deliver appropriate information (eg, general facts, benefits, and risks) about e-cigarettes.Trial registrationPROSPERO CRD42019121611; https://tinyurl.com/yfr27uxs.
| S-EPMC6996744 | biostudies-literature