How Italy Tweeted about COVID-19: Detecting Reactions to the Pandemic from Social Media.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Lorenzoni V
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9265594 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Higher education has been shifted toward blended learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. An increase in social media usage intensity and reduced face-to-face interaction due to the COVID-19 pandemic urged instructional communication researchers to revisit the dynamics of learners' group development in terms of their socialization and academic performance during the COVID-19 crisis. This research aimed to determine the mediating role of social media sociability between face-to-face socialization and academic performance of higher education students in blended learning environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was also the aim of the study to determine the moderating effect of social media usage intensity on social media sociability. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with the students (n = 340) enrolled in science teacher education departments of universities in Pakistan. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used for multivariate analysis. Results revealed that face-to-face socialization gave an essential start to develop a learning group. However, when face-to-face socialization was reduced due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was mediated by social media usage in blended learning environments to increase their socialization and academic performance during the crisis. The findings of the study are useful for higher education institutions to adopt social media strategies for students' socialization during the crisis.
| S-EPMC8583489 | biostudies-literature
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| S-EPMC7753419 | biostudies-literature
Project description:With the proliferation of social media networks, online discussions can serve as a microcosm of the greater public opinion about key issues that affect society as a whole. Online discussions have been catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic and have magnified challenges experienced by older adults, health care professionals, and caregivers of long-term care (LTC) residents. Our main goal was to examine how online discussions and public perceptions about LTC practices have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted a content analysis of Twitter posts about LTC to understand the nature of social media discussions regarding LTC practices prior to (March to June 2019) and following the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic (March to June 2020). We found that a much greater number of Twitter posts about LTC was shared during the COVID-19 period than in the year prior. Multiple themes emerged from the data including highlighting concerns about LTC, providing information about LTC, and interventions and ideas for improving LTC conditions. The proportion of posts linked to several of these themes changed as a function of the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, one major new issue that emerged in 2020 is that users began discussing the shortcomings of infection control during the pandemic. Our findings suggest that increased public concern offers momentum for embarking on necessary changes to improve conditions in LTC.
| S-EPMC9580405 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We study the role of social media in debates regarding two policy responses to COVID-19 in Switzerland: face-mask rules and contact-tracing apps. We use a dictionary classifier to categorize 612'177 tweets by parties, politicians, and the public as well as 441'458 articles published in 76 newspapers between February and August 2020. We distinguish between "problem" (COVID-19) and "solutions" (face masks and contact-tracing apps) and, using a vector autoregression approach, we analyze the relationship between their salience on social and traditional media, as well as among different groups on social media. We find that overall attention to COVID-19 was not driven by endogenous dynamics between the different actors. By contrast, the debate on face masks was led by the attentive public and by politicians, whereas parties and newspapers followed. The results illustrate how social media challenge the capacity of party and media elites to craft a consensus regarding the appropriateness of different measures as responses to a major crisis.
| S-EPMC8242806 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic had clear impacts on mental health. Social media presents an opportunity for assessing mental health at the population level.Objectives1) Identify and describe language used on social media that is associated with discourse about depression. 2) Describe the associations between identified language and COVID-19 incidence over time across several geographies.MethodsWe create a word embedding based on the posts in Reddit's /r/Depression and use this word embedding to train representations of active authors. We contrast these authors against a control group and extract keywords that capture differences between the two groups. We filter these keywords for face validity and to match character limits of an information retrieval system, Elasticsearch. We retrieve all geo-tagged posts on Twitter from April 2019 to June 2021 from Seattle, Sydney, Mumbai, and Toronto. The tweets are scored with BM25 using the keywords. We call this score rDD. We compare changes in average score over time with case counts from the pandemic's beginning through June 2021.ResultsWe observe a pattern in rDD across all cities analyzed: There is an increase in rDD near the start of the pandemic which levels off over time. However, in Mumbai we also see an increase aligned with a second wave of cases.ConclusionsOur results are concordant with other studies which indicate that the impact of the pandemic on mental health was highest initially and was followed by recovery, largely unchanged by subsequent waves. However, in the Mumbai data we observed a substantial rise in rDD with a large second wave. Our results indicate possible un-captured heterogeneity across geographies, and point to a need for a better understanding of this differential impact on mental health.
| S-EPMC9052361 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic is still undergoing complicated developments in Vietnam and around the world. There is a lot of information about the COVID-19 pandemic, especially on the internet where people can create and share information quickly. This can lead to an infodemic, which is a challenge every government might face in the fight against pandemics.ObjectiveThis study aims to understand public attention toward the pandemic (from December 2019 to November 2020) through 7 types of sources: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, blogs, news sites, forums, and e-commerce sites.MethodsWe collected and analyzed nearly 38 million pieces of text data from the aforementioned sources via SocialHeat, a social listening (infoveillance) platform developed by YouNet Group. We described not only public attention volume trends, discussion sentiments, top sources, top posts that gained the most public attention, and hot keyword frequency but also hot keywords' co-occurrence as visualized by the VOSviewer software tool.ResultsIn this study, we reached four main conclusions. First, based on changing discussion trends regarding the COVID-19 subject, 7 periods were identified based on events that can be aggregated into two pandemic waves in Vietnam. Second, community pages on Facebook were the source of the most engagement from the public. However, the sources with the highest average interaction efficiency per article were government sources. Third, people's attitudes when discussing the pandemic have changed from negative to positive emotions. Fourth, the type of content that attracts the most interactions from people varies from time to time. Besides that, the issue-attention cycle theory occurred not only once but four times during the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam.ConclusionsOur study shows that online resources can help the government quickly identify public attention to public health messages during times of crisis. We also determined the hot spots that most interested the public and public attention communication patterns, which can help the government get practical information to make more effective policy reactions to help prevent the spread of the pandemic.
| S-EPMC8288653 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Nowadays social media usage has increased drastically among the stakeholders of higher educational institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly increased the surge of social media users due to the forced implementation of online pedagogy and travel restrictions. The research study presented in this paper attempted to analyze social media usage in higher education. The data were collected from primary and secondary sources with the help of leading research databases, survey questionnaires, the Delphi method, and brainstorming sessions. Statistical tools and analytic techniques incorporated in the study included bibliometric analysis, word cloud, co-occurrence network, thematic map, thematic evolution, co-word analysis, country-wise analysis along with collaboration network, statistical survey, mind mapping, and analytic hierarchy process. The study justified the aspects of social media usage in the higher educational environment. It was found that the research fraternity around the globe focused more on understanding the aspects of social media and higher education during the trying times of the Coronavirus crisis. The maximum impact of social media usage on higher education was found to be from teaching–learning and discussions, and public relations and networking. It was also found that social networking platforms like WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook (Meta), LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter were very common among the stakeholders of higher education. This study is of huge importance because it can help in paving the way to strategize remedial measures for increasing positivity and minimizing the negativity of social media usage in institutions of higher education across the world. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10209-023-00988-x.
| S-EPMC10025795 | biostudies-literature
Project description:During the recent Covid-19 pandemic, additive Technology and Social Media were used to tackle the shortage of Personal Protective Equipment. A literature review and a social media listening software were employed to explore the number of the users referring to specific keywords related to 3D printing and PPE. Additionally, the QALY model was recruited to highlight the importance of the PPE usage. More than 7 billion users used the keyword covid or similar in the web while mainly Twitter and Facebook were used as a world platform for PPE designs distribution through individuals and more than 100 different 3D printable PPE designs were developed.
| S-EPMC7275995 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The restrictive measures adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic modified some previously consolidated drug use patterns. A focus on social networks allowed drug users to discuss, share opinions and provide advice during a worldwide emergency context. In order to explore COVID-19-related implications on drug trends/behaviour and on most popular psychotropic substances debated, the focus here was on the constantly updated, very popular, Reddit social platform's posts and comments. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of r/Drugs and related subreddits, using a social media listening netnographic approach, was carried out. The post/comments analysed covered the time-frame December 2019-May 2020. Between December 2019 and May 2020, the number of whole r/Drugs subreddit members increased from 619,563 to 676,581 members, respectively, thus increasing by 9.2% by the end of the data collection. Both the top-level r/Drugs subreddit and 92 related subreddits were quantitatively analysed, with posts/comments related to 12 drug categories. The drugs most frequently commented on included cannabinoids, psychedelics, opiates/opioids, alcohol, stimulants and prescribed medications. The qualitative analysis was carried out focussing on four subreddits, relating to some 1685 posts and 3263 comments. Four main themes of discussion (e.g., lockdown-associated immunity and drug intake issues; drug-related behaviour/after-quarantine plans' issues; lockdown-related psychopathological issues; and peer-to-peer advice at the time of COVID-19) and four categories of Redditors (e.g., those continuing the use of drugs despite the pandemic; the "couch epidemiologists"; the conspirationists/pseudo-science influencers; and the recovery-focused users) were tentatively identified here. A mixed-methods, social network-based analysis provided a range of valuable information on Redditors' drug use/behaviour during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further studies should be carried out focusing on other social networks as well as later phases of the pandemic.
| S-EPMC8303488 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Understanding attention dynamics on social media during pandemics could help governments minimize the effects. We focus on how COVID-19 has influenced the attention dynamics on the biggest Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo during the first four months of the pandemic. We study the real-time Hot Search List (HSL), which provides the ranking of the most popular 50 hashtags based on the amount of Sina Weibo searches. We show how the specific events, measures and developments during the epidemic affected the emergence of different kinds of hashtags and the ranking on the HSL. A significant increase of COVID-19 related hashtags started to occur on HSL around January 20, 2020, when the transmission of the disease between humans was announced. Then very rapidly a situation was reached where COVID-related hashtags occupied 30-70% of the HSL, however, with changing content. We give an analysis of how the hashtag topics changed during the investigated time span and conclude that there are three periods separated by February 12 and March 12. In period 1, we see strong topical correlations and clustering of hashtags; in period 2, the correlations are weakened, without clustering pattern; in period 3, we see a potential of clustering while not as strong as in period 1. We further explore the dynamics of HSL by measuring the ranking dynamics and the lifetimes of hashtags on the list. This way we can obtain information about the decay of attention, which is important for decisions about the temporal placement of governmental measures to achieve permanent awareness. Furthermore, our observations indicate abnormally higher rank diversity in the top 15 ranks on HSL due to the COVID-19 related hashtags, revealing the possibility of algorithmic intervention from the platform provider.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1140/epjds/s13688-021-00263-0.
| S-EPMC7856455 | biostudies-literature