arXivDaily arXiv每日学术速递 周一至周五更新
arXiv 2005.08379cs.SI
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Twitter上的COVID-19意识特征

Towards Characterizing COVID-19 Awareness on Twitter

Muhammad Saad, Muhammad Hassan, Fareed Zaffar

摘要:

新型冠状病毒(COVID-19)大流行显著改变了我们的生活方式,我们通过社交距离和隔离等预防措施尽量减少传播。一个日益令人担忧的方面是,疾病呈指数级蔓延与采取预防措施方面的拖延之间存在差距。这一差距是由于缺乏对这一疾病及其预防措施的认识。如今,社交媒体平台(即,Twitter)经常被用来提高人们对重大事件的认识,包括COVID-19。在本文中,我们通过分析受影响最严重的国家的信息流,使用Twitter来描述公众对COVID-19的认识。为此,我们从受影响最严重的前二十个国家收集了超过46,000条趋势和6.22亿条推文,以研究1)COVID-19相关趋势的时间演变,2)这些趋势中的推文数量和重复主题,以及3)用户对预防措施的看法。我们的研究结果表明,大流行传播较低的国家产生了更多的趋势和推文,以加快信息流动,并有助于提高公众意识。我们还观察到,在这些国家,COVID-19相关趋势是在病例数量急剧增加之前产生的,这表明有先发制人的尝试通知用户潜在的威胁。最后,我们注意到,在传播较低的国家,用户对COVID-19预防措施持积极态度。我们的测量和分析表明,有效的社交媒体使用可以影响公众行为,这可以用来更好地对抗未来的流行病。

英文摘要:

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has significantly altered our lifestyles as we resort to minimize the spread through preventive measures such as social distancing and quarantine. An increasingly worrying aspect is the gap between the exponential disease spread and the delay in adopting preventive measures. This gap is attributed to the lack of awareness about the disease and its preventive measures. Nowadays, social media platforms (ie., Twitter) are frequently used to create awareness about major events, including COVID-19. In this paper, we use Twitter to characterize public awareness regarding COVID-19 by analyzing the information flow in the most affected countries. Towards that, we collect more than 46K trends and 622 Million tweets from the top twenty most affected countries to examine 1) the temporal evolution of COVID-19 related trends, 2) the volume of tweets and recurring topics in those trends, and 3) the user sentiment towards preventive measures. Our results show that countries with a lower pandemic spread generated a higher volume of trends and tweets to expedite the information flow and contribute to public awareness. We also observed that in those countries, the COVID-19 related trends were generated before the sharp increase in the number of cases, indicating a preemptive attempt to notify users about the potential threat. Finally, we noticed that in countries with a lower spread, users had a positive sentiment towards COVID-19 preventive measures. Our measurements and analysis show that effective social media usage can influence public behavior, which can be leveraged to better combat future pandemics.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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