Moral Panic through the Lens of Twitter (original) (raw)
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Novel insights into views towards H1N1 during the 2009 Pandemic: a thematic analysis of Twitter data
Health Information & Libraries Journal, 2019
Background: Infectious disease outbreaks have the potential to cause a high number of fatalities and are a very serious public health risk. Objectives: Our aim was to utilise an indepth method to study a period of time where the H1N1 Pandemic of 2009 was at its peak. Methods: A data set of n = 214 784 tweets was retrieved and filtered, and the method of thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Results: Eight key themes emerged from the analysis of data: emotion and feeling, health related information, general commentary and resources, media and health organisations, politics, country of origin, food, and humour and/or sarcasm. Discussion: A major novel finding was that due to the name 'swine flu', Twitter users had the belief that pigs and pork could host and/or transmit the virus. Our paper also considered the methodological implications for the wider field of library and information science as well as specific implications for health information and library workers. Conclusions: Novel insights were derived on how users communicate about disease outbreaks on social media platforms. Our study also provides an innovative methodological contribution because it was found that by utilising an indepth method it was possible to extract greater insight into user communication.
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Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2021
Disruptions resulting from an epidemic might often appear to amount to chaos but, in reality, can be understood in a systematic way through the lens of “epidemic psychology”. According to Philip Strong, the founder of the sociological study of epidemic infectious diseases, not only is an epidemic biological; there is also the potential for three psycho-social epidemics: of fear, moralization, and action. This work empirically tests Strong’s model at scale by studying the use of language of 122M tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic posted in the U.S. during the whole year of 2020. On Twitter, we identified three distinct phases. Each of them is characterized by different regimes of the three psycho-social epidemics. In the refusal phase, users refused to accept reality despite the increasing number of deaths in other countries. In the anger phase (started after the announcement of the first death in the country), users’ fear translated into anger about the looming feeling that thi...
Using Twitter for insights into the 2009 swine flu and 2014 Ebola outbreaks
2018
Infectious disease outbreaks are a global public health risk that have the potential to take many lives in a short amount of time. It is important to understand the views and thought processes of the general public to have a better understanding of their perceptions of infectious diseases and how they spread. Social media platforms, originally intended for personal use, have recently been used in academic research for analysing public views and opinions as well as for disease mapping and tracking. Twitter, a widely-used microblogging platform, provides a unique opportunity to study the instant reactions of the public during disease outbreaks. This is because news of such epidemics on Twitter typically generate bursts of tweets. This abstract describes a study that is investigating user views during the peak of the 2009 Swine Flu and the 2014 Ebola outbreaks. Based on Google Trends data, tweets were retrieved from Twitter during a peak in Web search queries. Data were retrieved from ...
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Social Media in the Time of a Pandemic
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Social media has evolved from being a set of rudimentary tools to a complex instrument that has had both positive and negative consequences, often leading to widespread circulation of misinformation impacting societies and institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic, significantly, is the first health crisis, witnessed globally in the age of social media and amidst unprecedented connectivity. Throughout the pandemic, the world has witnessed a widespread use of social media. The medium has not only enabled isolated people to remain connected with their friends and families but also to communicate with medical experts. At the same time, myths about COVID-19, its treatment, and effects have circulated on the same platforms leading governments to issue guidelines in several countries including India. While social media has enabled a regular flow of information, it has also led to unverified content circulating on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, fueling panic in people about the virus an...
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In this study, we defined a Twitter network as an information channel that includes information sources containing embedded messages. We conducted stage-based comparative analyses of Twitter networks during three periods: the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, the period when the epidemic was becoming a global phenomenon, and the beginning of the pandemic. We also analyzed the characteristics of scientific information sources and content on Twitter during the sample period. At the beginning of the epidemic, Twitter users largely shared trustworthy news information sources about the novel coronavirus. Widely shared scientific information focused on clinical investigations and case studies of the new coronavirus as the disease became a pandemic while non-scientific information sources and messages illustrated the social and political aspects of the global outbreak, often including emotional elements. Multiple suspicious, bot-like Twitter accounts were identified as a great connector of the COVID-19 Twitterverse, particularly in the beginning of the global crisis. Our findings suggest that the information carriers, which are information channels, sources, and messages were coherently interlocked, forming an information organism. The study results can help public health organizations design communication strategies, which often require prompt decision-making to manage urgent needs under the circumstances of an epidemic.
Viral Fear or Panic Myth? Emotions in Ebola News and Social Media Responses
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The COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed debates about how the public and leaders respond to health threats and the role that the media and emotions play in these responses. Predating COVID-19, the 2014 Ebola outbreak can serve as a case to examine the constructions and pervasiveness of fear discourse and other emotions in news and social media. In this mixed-method study, we examine fear discourse in web-based and traditional newspaper headlines and emergent emotions in social media data (Twitter) during the peak of Ebola coverage. Users discuss fear on Twitter in a variety of ways and there was an increase in Tweets following the first Ebola case in the United States. However, it is humor, not fear, that is the most dominant theme in Twitter responses. Claims by health leaders and media scholars, that information technology and social media spread fear, receive limited support. Prevalence of different emotions vary across format (headlines and social media) and have important implications for understanding the myths and realities of public responses to health threats.
Erciyes İletişim Derğisi, 2022
Moral panic is a useful concept in terms of understanding and explaining the expression of fear and concern over an event that arises in the society in the triangle of power/power relations-public and the media. This study aimed to understand the construction of a process in which the fears and sensitivities of families towards the administration of the Covid-19 vaccines to children have risen in Turkey and created a kind of moral panic in terms of the hashtag #DenekDegilBebek. Following the statement that "Babies are 'accidentally' vaccinated against Covid-19" made by Prof. Dr. Zafer Kurugöl, who is an academic member of Ege University, Faculty of Medicine, to the NTV news bulletin on September 22, 2021, the hashtag has quickly become a trend topic (TT) on Twitter's agenda on September 23, 2021. For the purpose of this study, the hashtag #DenekDegilBebek, which is ranked of popular posts in the Twitter search engine, and 150 tweets that include this hashtag were analyzed by content analysis. In the study, it is concluded that an already existing fear and concern of families against vaccines has played a significant role in facilitating the construction of moral panic, however the reaction of families was quickly turned into a moral panic by antivaccine accounts on Twitter.
Public perception of COVID-19's global health crisis on Twitter until 14 weeks after the outbreak
Because language represents advanced aspects of human cognition, studying linguistic styles and figurative meaning have proven effective in measuring embodied cognition about the external world. This article defines the most worrisome topics people discussed from Weeks 1 to 14 after the outbreak and compares the message delivered by the literal use of words to the figurative use of metaphoric expressions. We bootstrapped representative data from Twitter over 14 weeks since the inception of the outbreak to be analyzed thematically using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) 2015 software as well as corpus tools. The MetaNet database, corpus tools, and manual annotation were used to detect expressions that can be linguistically mapped to the formalized list of conceptual metaphors. The most frequently tagged themes included 'the outbreak of the pandemic, its epidemiology, its prophylaxis measures, national and world economies, media', as well as the 'signs and symptoms of COVID-19'. Although LIWC-based analysis showed English-speaking tweeters maintained high levels of analytical thinking, elevated levels of anger, anxiety, and doubtfulness, there were discrepancies and improper conceptualization of the clinical picture of the pandemic.
Twitter, Politics, and the Pandemic
European journal of health communication, 2024
This article examines the intersection of politics, government, and health communication in the Scottish Twittersphere during the Covid-19 outbreak. It captures two phases of the pandemic: the beginning of the health crisis, and the rollout of the vaccination programme, coinciding with the emergence of the Delta variant in Scotland. A combination of thematic, quantitative content and social network analyses is employed to identify key themes emerging from the tweets of selected government and politicians' accounts, and to explore the formation of social networks communities. The thematic analysis reveals that Twitter has primarily been used for disseminating information about the virus, preventative measures, and government interventions, with limited efforts towards public engagement. Twitter communications became increasingly partisan as the pandemic progressed, with users frequently using the crisis as a political proxy. Five major clusters were detected in the Twitter network: two highly partisan and polarised clusters; a group containing numerous news media accounts reporting on the pandemic, and two clusters focusing primarily on the vaccination programme and the provision of health information, where the First Minister and the Scottish Government operate. Implications of these findings for government and political communication in health crises are discussed.