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Tracking Social Media Discourse About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development of a Public Coronavirus Twitter Data Set

Emily Chen, Kristina Lerman, Emilio Ferrara

JMIR Public Health and Surveillance · 2020

doi:10.2196/19273

Abstract

Background. At the time of this writing, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak has already put tremendous strain on many countries' citizens, resources, and economies around the world. Social distancing measures, travel bans, self-quarantines, and business closures are changing the very fabric of societies worldwide. With people forced out of public spaces, much of the conversation about these phenomena now occurs online on social media platforms like Twitter.

Objective. In this paper, we describe a multilingual COVID-19 Twitter data set that we are making available to the research community via our COVID-19-TweetIDs GitHub repository.

Methods. We started this ongoing data collection on January 28, 2020, leveraging Twitter’s streaming application programming interface (API) and Tweepy to follow certain keywords and accounts that were trending at the time data collection began. We used Twitter’s search API to query for past tweets, resulting in the earliest tweets in our collection dating back to January 21, 2020.

Results. Since the inception of our collection, we have actively maintained and updated our GitHub repository on a weekly basis. We have published over 123 million tweets, with over 60% of the tweets in English. This paper also presents basic statistics that show that Twitter activity responds and reacts to COVID-19-related events.

Conclusions. It is our hope that our contribution will enable the study of online conversation dynamics in the context of a planetary-scale epidemic outbreak of unprecedented proportions and implications. This data set could also help track COVID-19-related misinformation and unverified rumors or enable the understanding of fear and panic—and undoubtedly more.

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Cited by papers we hold 4

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Building a Public Twitter Data Set of Antivaccine Content, Vaccine Misinformation, and Conspiracies · 2021
No notice
COVID-19–Related Internet Search Patterns Among People in the United States: Exploratory Analysis · 2020
Not checked
Public Perception of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter: Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modeling Study · 2020
No notice
Twitter Discussions and Emotions About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Machine Learning Approach · 2020
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