ArticleScientific reports2021
Clusters of science and health related Twitter users become more isolated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Drivers of health polarization during the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review.Science advances · 2025Pooled it
- Anti-science and the science community.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2025Article
- Engineering the Discourse: the Role of Engineers in the Health Infodemic.Asian bioethics review · 2025Article
- Low credibility URL sharing on Twitter during reporting linking rare blood clots with the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.PloS one · 2024Article
- A natural language processing approach for analyzing COVID-19 vaccination response in multi-language and geo-localized tweets.Healthcare analytics (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Bifidobacteria define gut microbiome profiles of golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia) and marmoset (Callithrix sp.) metagenomic shotgun pools.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Anti-intellectualism amid the COVID-19 pandemic: The discursive elements and sources of anti-Fauci tweets.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2023Article
- Effects of media on preventive behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic.Humanities & social sciences communications · 2023Article
- Authorship identification using ensemble learning.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Relevance of E-Participation in the state health campaign in Spain: #EstoNoEsUnJuego / #ThisIsNotAGame.Technology in society · 2022Article
- Dynamics of social media behavior before and after SARS-CoV-2 infection.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
- Retweet communities reveal the main sources of hate speech.PloS one · 2022Article
- Mis-tweeting communication: a Vaccine Hesitancy analysis among twitter users in Italy.Acta bio-medica : Atenei Parmensis · 2021Article
- Are We Ready for the Arrival of the New COVID-19 Vaccinations? Great Promises and Unknown Challenges Still to Come.Vaccines · 2021Review
- Network Structure and Community Evolution Online: Behavioral and Emotional Changes in Response to COVID-19.Frontiers in public health · 2021Article
- Evolution of topics and hate speech in retweet network communities.Applied network science · 2021Article
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4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
COVID-19 represents the most severe global crisis to date whose public conversation can be studied in real time. To do so, we use a data set of over 350 million tweets and retweets posted by over 26 million English speaking Twitter users from January 13 to June 7, 2020. We characterize the retweet network to identify spontaneous clustering of users and the evolution of their interaction over time in relation to the pandemic's emergence. We identify several stable clusters (super-communities), and are able to link them to international groups mainly involved in science and health topics, national elites, and political actors. The science- and health-related super-community received disproportionate attention early on during the pandemic, and was leading the discussion at the time. However, as the pandemic unfolded, the attention shifted towards both national elites and political actors, paralleled by the introduction of country-specific containment measures and the growing politicization of the debate. Scientific super-community remained present in the discussion, but experienced less reach and became more isolated within the network. Overall, the emerging network communities are characterized by an increased self-amplification and polarization. This makes it generally harder for information from international health organizations or scientific authorities to directly reach a broad audience through Twitter for prolonged time. These results may have implications for information dissemination along the unfolding of long-term events like epidemic diseases on a world-wide scale.
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Registered trials
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