مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد آنچه رسانه های اجتماعی در زمان COVID-19 به ما گفتند – الزویر 2021

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Summary

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has rapidly become a crucial communication tool for information generation, dissemination, and consumption. In this scoping review, we selected and examined peer-reviewed empirical studies relating to COVID-19 and social media during the first outbreak from November, 2019, to November, 2020. From an analysis of 81 studies, we identified five overarching public health themes concerning the role of online social media platforms and COVID-19. These themes focused on: surveying public attitudes, identifying infodemics, assessing mental health, detecting or predicting COVID-19 cases, analysing government responses to the pandemic, and evaluating quality of health information in prevention education videos. Furthermore, our Review emphasises the paucity of studies on the application of machine learning on data from COVID-19-related social media and a scarcity of studies documenting real-time surveillance that was developed with data from social media on COVID-19. For COVID-19, social media can have a crucial role in disseminating health information and tackling infodemics and misinformation.

Introduction

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and the resulting COVID-19, is a substantial international public health issue. As of Jan 18, 2021, an estimated 95 million people worldwide had been infected with the virus, with about 2 million deaths.1 As a consequence of the pandemic, social media is becoming the platform of choice for public opinions, perceptions, and attitudes towards various events or public health policies regarding COVID-19.2 Social media has become a pivotal communication tool for governments, organisations, and universities to disseminate crucial information to the public. Numerous studies have already used social media data to help to identify and detect outbreaks of infectious diseases and to interpret public attitudes, behaviours, and perceptions.3,  4,  5,  6 Social media, particularly Twitter, can be used to explore multiple facets of public health research. A systematic review identified six categories of Twitter use for health research, namely content analysis, surveillance, engagement, recruitment, as part of an intervention, and network analysis of Twitter users.5 However, this review included only broader research terms, such as health, medicine, or disease, by use of Twitter data and did not focus on specific disease topics, such as COVID-19. Another article analysed tweets on COVID-19 and identified 12 topics that were categorised into four main themes: the origin, source, effects on individuals and countries, and methods of decreasing the spread of SARS-CoV-2.7 In this study, data were not available for tweets that were related to COVID-19 before February, 2020, thereby missing the initial part of the epidemic, and the data for tweets were limited to between Feb 2 and March 15, 2020.

Social media can also be effectively used to communicate health information to the general public during a pandemic. Emerging infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, almost always result in increased usage and consumption of media of all forms by the general public for information.8 Therefore, social media has a crucial role in people’s perception of disease exposure, resultant decision making, and risk behaviours.9,  10 As information on social media is generated by users, such information can be subjective or inaccurate, and frequently includes misinformation and conspiracy theories.11 Hence, it is imperative that accurate and timely information is disseminated to the general public about emerging threats, such as SARS-CoV-2. A systematic review explored the major approaches that were used in published research on social media and emerging infectious diseases.12 The review identified three major approaches: assessment of the public’s interest in, and responses to, emerging infectious diseases; examination of organisations’ use of social media in communicating emerging infectious diseases; and evaluation of the accuracy of medical information that is related to emerging infectious diseases on social media. However, this review did not focus on studies that used social media data to track and predict outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases.