scholarly journals Genomics, social media and the novel coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Morinha ◽  
Paula Magalhães
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

scholarly journals Endangering the Endangered: Impact of fake Covid-19 Social Media Communications in Zimbabwe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Mhute ◽  
Hugh Mangeya ◽  
Ernest Jakaza
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The People ◽  
Media Communications ◽  
The Government ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Great Danger

The human species is in great danger of extinction due to the novel coronavirus that was first detected in China around December 2019. By March 2021, the world had witnessed over 116million cases, of which 36,223 are Zimbabwean. The disease that the coronavirus stimulates is quite fatal and has seen 2.57million lives succumbing to it, of which 1483 are Zimbabwean, by the same date. No cure has been discovered for it yet, though scientific researchers have already discovered several vaccines with varying efficacies. Employing a socio-pragmatic approach, the chapter explores the impact of fake covid-19 social media communications on efforts to minimize infections and fatalities in Zimbabwe, an already endangered country. It accomplishes this by qualitatively analyzing purposively sampled fake communications in circulation on social media as well as some of the utterances and behaviors people make in response to them. The chapter demonstrates the negative impact of the communications on international mitigating efforts and emphasizes the need for the government, media practitioners and social workers to always be watchful for such misleading communications and in every case to quickly counter their impact by availing correct information to the people.

scholarly journals Risk Communication in Asian Countries: COVID-19 Discourse on Twitter (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sungkyu Park ◽  
Sungwon Han ◽  
Jeongwook Kim ◽  
Mir Majid Molaie ◽  
Hoang Dieu Vu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Risk Communication ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
World Health ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

BACKGROUND The novel coronavirus disease (hereafter COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused a global pandemic. During this time, a plethora of information regarding COVID-19 containing both false information (misinformation) and accurate information circulated on social media. The World Health Organization has declared a need to fight not only the pandemic but also the infodemic (a portmanteau of information and pandemic). In this context, it is critical to analyze the quality and veracity of information shared on social media and the evolution of discussions on major topics regarding COVID-19. OBJECTIVE This research characterizes risk communication patterns by analyzing public discourse on the novel coronavirus in four Asian countries that suffered outbreaks of varying degrees of severity: South Korea, Iran, Vietnam, and India. METHODS We collect tweets on COVID-19 posted from the four Asian countries from the start of their respective COVID-19 outbreaks in January until March 2020. We consult with locals and utilize relevant keywords from the local languages, following each country's tweet conventions. We then utilize a natural language processing (NLP) method to learn topics in an unsupervised fashion automatically. Finally, we qualitatively label the extracted topics to comprehend their semantic meanings. RESULTS We find that the official phases of the epidemic, as announced by the governments of the studied countries, do not align well with the online attention paid to COVID-19. Motivated by this misalignment, we develop a new natural language processing method to identify the transitions in topic phases and compare the identified topics across the four Asian countries. We examine the time lag between social media attention and confirmed patient counts. We confirm an inverse relationship between the tweet count and topic diversity. CONCLUSIONS Through the current research, we observe similarities and differences in the social media discourse on the pandemic in different Asian countries. We observe that once the daily tweet count hits its peak, the successive tweet count trend tends to decrease for all countries. This phenomenon aligns with the dynamics of the issue-attention cycle, an existing construct from communication theory conceptualizing how an issue rises and falls from public attention. Little work has been performed to identify topics in online risk communication by collectively considering temporal tweet trends in different countries. In this regard, if a critical piece of misinformation can be detected at an early stage in one country, it can be reported to prevent the spread of misinformation in other countries. Therefore, this work can help social media services, social media communicators, journalists, policymakers, and medical professionals fight the infodemic on a global scale. CLINICALTRIAL N/A

scholarly journals What types of COVID-19 conspiracies are populated by Twitter bots?

First Monday ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilio Ferrara
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Health Concerns ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
Early Evidence ◽  
Containment Measures ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

With people moving out of physical public spaces due to containment measures to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, online platforms become even more prominent tools to understand social discussion. Studying social media can be informative to assess how we are collectively coping with this unprecedented global crisis. However, social media platforms are also populated by bots, automated accounts that can amplify certain topics of discussion at the expense of others. In this paper, we study 43.3M English tweets about COVID-19 and provide early evidence of the use of bots to promote political conspiracies in the United States, in stark contrast with humans who focus on public health concerns.

Social Media Marketing of Brands in the COVID-19 Pandemic

2022 ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Petek Tosun
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Media Marketing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Brand Promotion ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Social Media Communication

This chapter explores the social media marketing communication of brands in the first days of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak within the theoretical framework provided by signaling theory. The social media content of six Turkish brands was examined by content analysis. The findings have shown that brands shared posts in four themes: brand promotion, brand's COVID-19 messages, product promotion, and special day posts. Brands integrated the COVID-19 agenda in their social media communication in two ways. First, they designed and shared posts that focused solely on the pandemic. These COVID-19-related posts constituted a separate category that did not include any direct relevance to the brands' promotion activities. Second, they added COVID-19-related points in their social media posts. This study provides valuable findings for marketing practitioners and academicians regarding social media communication in a global health crisis.

scholarly journals Rise and fall of the global conversation and shifting sentiments during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiangliang Zhang ◽  
Qiang Yang ◽  
Somayah Albaradei ◽  
Xiaoting Lyu ◽  
Hind Alamro ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Machine Learning Classification ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Slow Decline ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Learning Language

AbstractSocial media (e.g., Twitter) has been an extremely popular tool for public health surveillance. The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the first pandemic experienced by a world connected through the internet. We analyzed 105+ million tweets collected between March 1 and May 15, 2020, and Weibo messages compiled between January 20 and May 15, 2020, covering six languages (English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Italian, and Chinese) and represented an estimated 2.4 billion citizens worldwide. To examine fine-grained emotions during a pandemic, we built machine learning classification models based on deep learning language models to identify emotions in social media conversations about COVID-19, including positive expressions (optimistic, thankful, and empathetic), negative expressions (pessimistic, anxious, sad, annoyed, and denial), and a complicated expression, joking, which has not been explored before. Our analysis indicates a rapid increase and a slow decline in the volume of social media conversations regarding the pandemic in all six languages. The upsurge was triggered by a combination of economic collapse and confinement measures across the regions to which all the six languages belonged except for Chinese, where only the latter drove conversations. Tweets in all analyzed languages conveyed remarkably similar emotional states as the epidemic was elevated to pandemic status, including feelings dominated by a mixture of joking with anxious/pessimistic/annoyed as the volume of conversation surged and shifted to a general increase in positive states (optimistic, thankful, and empathetic), the strongest being expressed in Arabic tweets, as the pandemic came under control.

scholarly journals COVID-19–Related Rumor Content, Transmission, and Clarification Strategies in China: Descriptive Study (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peishan Ning ◽  
Peixia Cheng ◽  
Jie Li ◽  
Ming Zheng ◽  
David C Schwebel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Public Health Emergencies ◽  
Medical Supplies ◽  
Health Authorities ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

BACKGROUND Given the permeation of social media throughout society, rumors spread faster than ever before, which significantly complicates government responses to public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE We aimed to examine the characteristics and propagation of rumors during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in China and evaluated the effectiveness of health authorities’ release of correction announcements. METHODS We retrieved rumors widely circulating on social media in China during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and assessed the effectiveness of official government clarifications and popular science articles refuting those rumors. RESULTS We show that the number of rumors related to the COVID-19 pandemic fluctuated widely in China between December 1, 2019 and April 15, 2020. Rumors mainly occurred in 3 provinces: Hubei, Zhejiang, and Guangxi. Personal social media accounts constituted the major source of media reports of the 4 most widely distributed rumors (the novel coronavirus can be prevented with “Shuanghuanglian”: 7648/10,664, 71.7%; the novel coronavirus is the SARS coronavirus: 14,696/15,902, 92.4%; medical supplies intended for assisting Hubei were detained by the local government: 3911/3943, 99.2%; asymptomatically infected persons were regarded as diagnosed COVID-19 patients with symptoms in official counts: 322/323, 99.7%). The number of rumors circulating was positively associated with the severity of the COVID-19 epidemic (ρ=0.88, 95% CI 0.81-0.93). The release of correction articles was associated with a substantial decrease in the proportion of rumor reports compared to accurate reports. The proportions of negative sentiments appearing among comments by citizens in response to media articles disseminating rumors and disseminating correct information differ insignificantly (both correct reports: χ<sub>1</sub><sup>2</sup>=0.315, <i>P</i>=.58; both rumors: χ<sub>1</sub><sup>2</sup>=0.025, <i>P</i>=.88; first rumor and last correct report: χ<sub>1</sub><sup>2</sup>=1.287, <i>P</i>=.26; first correct report and last rumor: χ<sub>1</sub><sup>2</sup>=0.033, <i>P</i>=.86). CONCLUSIONS Our results highlight the importance and urgency of monitoring and correcting false or misleading reports on websites and personal social media accounts. The circulation of rumors can influence public health, and government bodies should establish guidelines to monitor and mitigate the negative impact of such rumors.

scholarly journals Early Days of the Novel Coronavirus: Public Response in Social Media during the First Month of the Outbreak

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 ◽  
pp. 159-182
Author(s):  
Maris Kuperjanov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Public Response ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Environments ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Flow Of Information

The aim of the article is to give an overview of the first month of the novel coronavirus outbreak and of the public reactions to the news in media comments and social media environments in both local Estonian and global contexts. The pandemic was still ongoing at the time the article was published and, with some modifications and new emphases, vernacular reactions in the media (incl. social media) continued flourishing. During the first month (January 2020), the growing flow of information and rapid escalation of the situation made the topic more noticeable in both the media and social media, and thus provided a fertile basis for jokes and internet memes, legends, fake news, misinformation, conspiracy theories, etc., as was the case with the former bigger epidemics and pandemics. As it has also been observed previously, the consequences of some fake news, misinformation, and conspiracy theories may often be more harmful for society than the disease itself. Several motifs and storylines are universal and surge as similar situations arise both in Estonia and all over the world. The article also presents a selection of more prominent topics and examples of the outbreak from social media environments during the initial phase of international awareness of the novel coronavirus.

scholarly journals Awareness and perception of COVID-19 among the general population: A Middle Eastern survey

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. e0250461
Author(s):  
Ruba M. Jaber ◽  
Baraa Mafrachi ◽  
Abdallah Al-Ani ◽  
Mustafa Shkara
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Information Source ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cross Sectional Survey ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Two Populations

Due to the sudden emergence of the novel coronavirus as a worldwide pandemic, this study aimed to evaluate the awareness and practices of both the Jordanian and Iraqi populations during the early stages of the pandemic. A cross-sectional survey was conducted between the 19th and 22nd of March to assess the public’s awareness toward COVID-19. Multiple scored domains were used to assess the differences between the two populations. Statistical analysis was conducted to reveal the influence of sociodemographic variables on these scores. A total of 3167 participants were recruited in the study, of which, 1599 (50.5%) were from Jordan and 1568 (49.5%) were from Iraq. More than half of the Jordanian (56.8%) and Iraqi participants (53.2%) showed average or adequate awareness about COVID-19. More than 60% of both populations relied on medical staff for COVID-19 related information. Social media was the second most common COVID-19 information source, as it was reported by 53.7% of Jordanian participants and 62.8% of Iraqi participants. More than 90% of both populations participated in precautionary measurements. Finally, about 20% of both populations failed to recognize droplet inhalation as a source of transmission. Despite the portrayed awareness levels, governmental involvement is warranted to increase the public’s awareness and fill the gaps within their knowledge.

scholarly journals Senna Makki and the COVID-19 pandemic: a reflection from Pakistan

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 5194
Author(s):  
Sahil Kumar ◽  
Ramsha Naeem ◽  
Anum Syed Tauqir Radhawi ◽  
Syed Uzair Mahmood ◽  
Zehra Batool ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Developing Countries ◽  
Treatment Options ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Misleading Information ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Variant ◽  
Herbal Medications ◽  
High Doses ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) since December 2019 has created an unprecedented state. As it is a new variant of a virus treatment options are not only limited but require painstaking trials to confirm their effectiveness. Due to the lack of awareness in many developing countries people have started using herbal medications, used for various other diseases, to combat COVID-19. Misleading information on social media regarding “Senna Makki” has gone viral in Pakistan. However, consumption of Senna Makki is not advised as a treatment option for COVID-19 due to its many harmful associated side-effects. Although its use in other diseases is evident, trials to confirm its effectiveness against COVID-19 need to be prioritized as the public has started consuming Senna Makki in high doses and without monitored prescription.  

scholarly journals Historicising “containment and delay”: COVID-19, the NHS and high-risk patients

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin D. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
National Health Service ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
First Case ◽  
Form Part ◽  
The Face ◽  
Risk Patients ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

Despite the first case of the novel coronavirus only being reported to the WHO at the end of December 2019, humanities and social science scholars have been quick to subject local, national and international responses to COVID-19 to critique. Through television and radio, blogs, social media and other outlets, historians in particular have situated the ongoing outbreak in relation to previous epidemics and historicised cultural and political responses. This paper furthers these historical considerations of the current pandemic by examining the way the National Health Service (NHS) and discourses of risk have figured in public and policy responses. It suggests that appeals to protect the NHS are based on longer-term anxieties about the service’s capacity to care and endure in the face of growing demand, as well as building on the attachment that has developed as a result of this persistence in the face of existential threats. Similarly, the position of elderly, vulnerable and “at risk” patients relates to complex histories in which their place in social and medical hierarchies have been ambiguous. It thus argues that the ways in which time appears as both a threat and a possibility of management in the current crisis form part of a longer trajectory of political and cultural thinking.

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