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 particularly
striking aspect of our dataset: the prominent position of @realdonaldtrump
in Twitter networks related to four key terms of the COVID-19 pandemic in
2020.