A Theoretical Analysis on Health-Related Twitter Information During the First Philippine COVID-19 Lockdown

As the global pandemic continuously affect millions to date, an abundant number of internet users turn to seek and share health information in mainstream social networking sites such as Twitter. This study is a theoretically based qualitative analysis on the utilization of health information during the first COVID-19 Philippine lockdown. With Uses and Gratifications Theory as its theoretical lens, results suggest that health information on tips and pointers on COVID-19 prevention are commonly sought and shared, along with the latest information on COVID-19 health statistics, and the economic impact of pandemic on business ventures and on personal lives. But more importantly, this paper argues that more than utilizing health information to meet user cognitive needs (information seeking and sharing), social and integrative needs were also met and vital through the themes surrounding community engagement and social interactions. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Investigating Unrelated #COVID19 Twitter Expressions: Implications of Spam Content on Information Credibility

Twitter is considered one of the most popular social networking platforms. More than microblogging, it has evolved to be an integral source of information from daily news, current events, and other trending topics on social media. Since the emergence of COVID-19 in Asia in 2019, Twitter has become one of the platforms primarily utilized for information seeking and sharing by Internet users to keep updated with and disseminate relevant information about the virus and its spread. However, the health crisis was no exception in attracting the attention of spammers in exploiting the platform with scams and other malicious content. In this study, tweets containing trending hashtags related to COVID-19 were culled from Twitter to investigate the presence of spam tweets and to assess its possible impact on the information credibility of the platform. Though results suggest that the volume of unrelated Twitter expressions was minimal, this research argues that irrelevant tweets were substantial enough to pose implications detrimental to hashtag use and knowledge discovery. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.