During the #COVID19 pandemic, what is spreading along the virus with same intensity is misleading information about the virus. We studied the COVID19-related conversations on Pakistani Twitter, focusing on politics, health, and rumors.
A🧵showcasing our initial observations.
A🧵showcasing our initial observations.
We collected the tweets with Pakistan-specific hashtags. The tweets with the highest virality were analyzed for their content, language, sentiment, etc. The data are presented on the #infodemic tab of our 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 website.
covidinpakistan.com/analytics/
covidinpakistan.com/analytics/
What is infodemic? It refers to an overflow of information, including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak.
who.int/health-topics/…
who.int/health-topics/…
We categorized tweets into major themes, including Politics, Science, Pseudoscience, Humour, Conspiracies. The most common theme was politics. However, the tweets that talked about COVID19 science or presented pseudoscientific theories had higher engagement scores.
Content analysis provides a more comprehensive overview of the Twitter conversations. For instance, we study the potential impact of any tweet on COVID19 risk. We observed that tweets urging people to behave in a certain way had a significantly higher retweet count.
The tweets with the highest retweets had either neutral or negative sentiment.
As it is an interactive website, you can select different bars and see how the trends and analyses change. Go ahead and try!
You will also find some of the sample tweets that were analyzed for this work. For instance, this is one of the tweets classified as COVID19-Pseudoscience.
https://twitter.com/gulsher34/status/1242111835718979585
These are a few conspiracy theories that we found on Twitter.
This is an example of COVID humor! 😂
https://twitter.com/moto_suo/status/1242691995635679232
Currently, we are working on the metaphor analysis and understanding the historical question of distrust for modern science that contributes towards the shaping of responses towards COVID19.
I am extremely thankful to all the collaborators and colleagues for their work and support for this project @AU_Qasmi @mjav74 @onlyasimwaheed @talhajms @MunirRimsha @NailaShoaib14 @NailaRiaz000
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