ArticleOpen forum infectious diseases2020
An "Infodemic": Leveraging High-Volume Twitter Data to Understand Early Public Sentiment for the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Outbreak.
Article in Open forum infectious diseases, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Adoption of Digital Technologies in Health Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Systematic Review of Early Scientific Literature.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Pooled it
- Social Contagion in COVID-19 Discussions Within the Belgian Reddit Community: Statistical and Modeling Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Examining Racial Discrimination Index and Black-Years of Potential Life Lost (YPLL) in South Carolina: A Real-Time Social Media Research.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- Group cognitive space of online rumors in public health emergencies: a theoretical and empirical study.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Surveillance of Twitter Data on COVID-19 Symptoms During the Omicron Variant Period: A Sentiment Analysis.JMIR formative research · 2025Article
- Social Media as an Emotional Barometer: Bidirectional Encoder Representations From Transformers-Long Short-Term Memory Sentiment Analysis on the Evolution of Public Sentiments During Influenza A on Sina Weibo.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Analysis of Social Media Perceptions During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United Kingdom: Social Listening Study (2019-2022).JMIR formative research · 2025Article
- Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Social Determinants of Health Issues of Marginalized Black and Asian Communities: A Social Media Analysis Empowered by Natural Language Processing.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2025Article
- Birds of a feather? Mis- and dis-information on the social media platform X related to avian influenza.Antimicrobial stewardship & healthcare epidemiology : ASHE · 2025Article
- An Agenda for Public Health Diplomacy in an Age of Populism.Public health reviews · 2025Article
- CoViNAR: a context-aware social media dataset for pandemic severity level prediction and analysis.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2025Article
- A National Discussion of COVID-19 on Twitter.Journal of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada = Journal officiel de l'Association pour la microbiologie medicale et l'infectiologie Canada · 2024Article
- Analysis of Pharmaceutical Companies' Social Media Activity during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Impact on the Public.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Privacy Concerns About Sharing General and Specific Health Information on Twitter: Quantitative Study.JMIR formative research · 2024Article
- The role of social media in public health crises caused by infectious disease: a scoping review.BMJ global health · 2023Article
- Leveraging twitter data to understand nurses' emotion dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic.Health information science and systems · 2023Article
- Twitter discussions on breastfeeding during the COVID-19 pandemic.International breastfeeding journal · 2023Article
- Public Health Policy, Political Ideology, and Public Emotion Related to COVID-19 in the U.S.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Effect of Recent Abortion Legislation on Twitter User Engagement, Sentiment, and Expressions of Trust in Clinicians and Privacy of Health Information: Content Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Dynamics of the Negative Discourse Toward COVID-19 Vaccines: Topic Modeling Study and an Annotated Data Set of Twitter Posts.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundTwitter has been used to track trends and disseminate health information during viral epidemics. On January 21, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention activated its Emergency Operations Center and the World Health Organization released its first situation report about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), sparking significant media attention. How Twitter content and sentiment evolved in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic has not been described.
methodsWe extracted tweets matching hashtags related to COVID-19 from January 14 to 28, 2020 using Twitter's application programming interface. We measured themes and frequency of keywords related to infection prevention practices. We performed a sentiment analysis to identify the sentiment polarity and predominant emotions in tweets and conducted topic modeling to identify and explore discussion topics over time. We compared sentiment, emotion, and topics among the most popular tweets, defined by the number of retweets.
resultsWe evaluated 126 049 tweets from 53 196 unique users. The hourly number of COVID-19-related tweets starkly increased from January 21, 2020 onward. Approximately half (49.5%) of all tweets expressed fear and approximately 30% expressed surprise. In the full cohort, the economic and political impact of COVID-19 was the most commonly discussed topic. When focusing on the most retweeted tweets, the incidence of fear decreased and topics focused on quarantine efforts, the outbreak and its transmission, as well as prevention.
conclusionsTwitter is a rich medium that can be leveraged to understand public sentiment in real-time and potentially target individualized public health messages based on user interest and emotion.
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