Penn researchers analyze Twitter to track changing perceptions of coronavirus

To help physicians and health officials identify new hot spots for the coronavirus and track how the pandemic is changing over time, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania built a tool that collects tweets about COVID-19 and maps them across the nation.

The Twitter map, which was developed by the Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health, charts changes in language about stress, anxiety, and overall sentiment of the pandemic; common topics people are discussing like health care, panic buying, politics, and economic concerns; COVID-19 symptoms; and tweets per capita by state. Researchers pull between four million and five million coronavirus-related tweets a day and analyze them for positive or negative sentiment.

They found that Twitter engagement surrounding coronavirus has increased in the last month, and there has been an uptick in use of language about stress and anxiety.

This is not the first time that the Center for Digital Health has used social media to look at trends or patterns surrounding a current health issue —in November, the team published a study that used tweets with words like lonely or alone to identify early signs of mental health issues.

In an article published in JAMA Network last month, Raina Merchant, an associate vice president at Penn Medicine and an associate professor of emergency medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, wrote that “integrating social media as an essential tool in preparedness, response, and recovery can influence the response to COVID-19.”

Previously, Merchant, who studies how social media can be used during public health emergencies, used social media to understand the effects of the recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks.

“What’s different about those health emergencies is that there was no sheltering in place,” she said. “But everybody is affected here, and many people are inside. People are using social media as a way to communicate and share information organically, so we want to learn from that.”

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Sharath Guntuku, a research scientist at the Center for Digital Health, said he noticed a huge shift in Twitter language as the pandemic is progressing.

“There has been consistently elevated use in anxious language on Twitter,” he said. “There’s also a lot of diversity. For example, some states are talking about behaviors like social distancing and washing your hands. Other states are talking about things being canceled in states that haven’t been hit as hard yet.”

In areas with a lot of COVID-19 cases, Guntuku said, more people tweet about concerns regarding testing or the lack of personal protective equipment for health-care workers. In states with fewer cases, people are discussing how COVID-19 is like the flu, or that it could be a hoax.

“The language used surrounding this is more emotionally charged than before,” Guntuku said.

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One of the ways social media platforms can be leveraged during the pandemic is by directing people to trusted sources of information like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, said Merchant. Misleading information has been a serious problem during the pandemic — an analysis published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford found that roughly one in three people in the United States, United Kingdom, South Korea, Argentina, Germany, and Spain say they’ve seen false or misleading information on social media related to the coronavirus.

While the Twitter map only presents variability in coronavirus-related topics that are being discussed in different parts of the country, Merchant and her team are hoping they’ll be able to identify false information too.

“It’s really important to us that people are directed to places where they can get accurate, up-to-date information,” she said.

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Guntuku also said that watching for symptoms on social media can help doctors identify when a surge in cases is likely to occur, so they can prepare by asking for more staff and equipment.

“Understanding what people are concerned about, which symptoms they’re experiencing and when, could be really helpful in informing the health system,” he said. “Social media is a good place to try and develop interventions.”