Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 5, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 28, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Nov 5, 2020
Social media concerns during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An analysis of Sina Weibo Microblogging data
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global health crisis, affecting economies and societies around the world. During times of uncertainty and unexpected change, citizens have turned to social media as a mediating tool for communicating primary sources of information. Platforms have allowed communities to come together for discussion and emotional support, and have played an important role for individuals, governments and organizations in publishing and exchanging information, and expressing opinions. However, limited research exists that studies the main concerns of citizens on social media during the pandemic.
Objective:
The purpose of this study is to examine the main concerns raised and discussed by citizens on Sina Weibo, the largest social media platform in China, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods:
This study uses a web crawler tool and a set of predefined search terms ("New Crown Pneumonia," "New Crown Virus" and "COVID-19") to investigate the concerns raised on the Sina Weibo platform. We collect the textual information and metadata (number of likes, comments, retweets, publishing time, and publishing location) of microblogs published from February 2, 2020 to March 15, 2020. After segmenting the words of the text collected, we used a topic modeling technique, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm, to identify the most common topics posted by microbloggers. We analyzed the emotional tendency of topics, calculated the proportion distribution of topics, performed user’ behavior analysis on the topics using the data of: number of likes, comments and retweets, and studied the change in user concerns and the differences in participatory discussion between citizens living in different regions in China.
Results:
Based on the 158,386 eligible microblog posts collected, we identified 11 topics, which were grouped into 6 themes. Ranked by the level of attention, these topics were: Pandemic statistics (27.7%); Transmission routes and preventive measures (22.7%); Epidemics in Wuhan (16.5%); Detection and quarantine (13.4%); New Crown Treatments (13.1%); Work and production resumption (12.9%); Epidemics in other countries around the world (11.7%); refueling and saluting towards anti-epidemic action (10.1%); Economic impact (6%); and Study resumption (3.5%). The mean sentiment was positive for 6 topics and negative for 5 topics. The topic with the highest mean of retweets was: Epidemics in Wuhan, while the topic with the highest mean of comments and likes was: Study resumption.
Conclusions:
Citizen’s concerns on social media are highly correlated with the development of the pandemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has provided a platform for Chinese government departments and organizations to better understand public concerns and demands. Similarly, social media has provided a channel to disseminate information about epidemic prevention and has influenced public’ attitudes and behaviors. Government departments, especially health related, can create appropriate policies in a timely manner through monitoring social media platforms to guide the public’s views and behaviors during epidemics.
Citation
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