Social status and novelty drove the spread of online information during the early stages of COVID-19.
Sci Rep
; 11(1): 20098, 2021 10 11.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1462023
ABSTRACT
Access to online information has been crucial throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed more than eight million randomly selected Twitter posts from the first wave of the pandemic to study the role of the author's social status (Health Expert or Influencer) and the informational novelty of the tweet in the diffusion of several key types of information. Our results show that health-related information and political discourse propagated faster than personal narratives, economy-related or travel-related news. Content novelty further accelerated the spread of these discussion themes. People trusted health experts on health-related knowledge, especially when it was novel, while influencers were more effective at propagating political discourse. Finally, we observed a U-shaped relationship between the informational novelty and the number of retweets. Tweets with average novelty spread the least. Tweets with high novelty propagated the most, primarily when they discussed political, health, or personal information, perhaps owing to the immediacy to mobilize this information. On the other hand, economic and travel-related information spread most when it was less novel, and people resisted sharing such information before it was duly verified.
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Psychological Distance
/
Information Dissemination
/
Pandemics
/
Social Media
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Experimental Studies
/
Observational study
/
Randomized controlled trials
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
Sci Rep
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
S41598-021-99060-y
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