Social status and novelty drove the spread of online information during the early stages of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has viciously engulfed the entire world since January 2020, representing a crisis of an order unseen in the recent past. While the world has been scrambling to come to order and restore normalcy, social media has served as an essential conduit of information exchange during this time while also creating channels of coordination between geographically distant individuals

Access to online information has been crucial throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed more than eight million randomly selected Twitter posts from the first wave of the pandemic to study the role of the author’s social status (Health Expert or Influencer) and the informational novelty of the tweet in the diffusion of several key types of information. Our results show that health-related information and political discourse propagated faster than personal narratives, economy-related or travel-related news. Content novelty further accelerated the spread of these discussion themes. People trusted health experts on health-related knowledge, especially when it was novel, while influencers were more effective at propagating political discourse. Finally, we observed a U-shaped relationship between the informational novelty and the number of retweets. Tweets with average novelty spread the least. Tweets with high novelty propagated the most, primarily when they discussed political, health, or personal information, perhaps owing to the immediacy to mobilize this information. On the other hand, economic and travel-related information spread most when it was less novel, and people resisted sharing such information before it was duly verified.

Early studies investigating COVID-19 information sharing on Twitter show a high correlation between tweet volume and the number of cases reported, and that the announcement of the first COVID-19 case led to an increase in information-seeking regarding the virus but not about the treatment or non-pharmaceutical interventions. Studies of Reddit posts revealed people to be feeling more socially connected to their family during the pandemic outbreak than before the pandemic. There was also evidence regarding the evolution of emotions from fear to anger during the initial stages of the pandemic, with the anger being related to xenophobia. However, the discourse shifted to the stay-at-home practices as the pandemic progressed. Read more...

Back to Health