Social media and public perception as core aspect of public health: the cautionary case of @realdonaldtrump and COVID-19

The social media milieu in which we are enmeshed has substantive impacts on our beliefs and perceptions. Recent work has established that this can play a role in influencing understanding of, and reactions to, public health information. Twitter, in particular, appears to play a substantive role in the public health information ecosystem. From July 25th, 2020 to November 15th, 2020, we collected weekly tweets related to COVID-19 keywords and assessed their networks, patterns and properties. Our analyses revealed the dominance of a handful of individual accounts as central structuring agents in the networks of tens of thousands of tweets and retweets, and thus millions of views, related to specific COVID-19 keywords. These few individual accounts and the content of their tweets, mentions, and retweets are substantially overrepresented in terms of public exposure to, and thus interaction with, critical elements of public health information in the pandemic. Here we report on one particularl...

我们深陷其中的社交媒体场域，会对个体的信念与认知产生实质性影响。现有研究已证实，此类场域会影响人们对公共卫生信息的理解与应对。其中，推特（Twitter）在公共卫生信息生态系统中扮演着尤为关键的角色。本研究于2020年7月25日至2020年11月15日期间，每周采集与新冠病毒（COVID-19）关键词相关的推文，并对其传播网络、内容模式与结构属性展开评估。分析结果显示，在与特定新冠病毒关键词相关的数万条推文与转发帖、覆盖数百万次曝光的传播网络中，仅有少量个人账号占据主导地位，成为此类网络的核心架构主体。在新冠疫情期间，公众接触乃至互动的公共卫生信息关键内容中，这类少数个人账号及其发布的推文、提及内容与转发帖的占比远超正常水平。本文将针对其中一类特定内容展开相关汇报（原文此处未完整）