Spatial Distribution of Social Media Topics Regarding COVID-19 and Related Public Health Policies

Le résumé fourni par la source

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, general public opinion in the United States has shown a decrease in trust in public health organizations and public health campaigns. Using social media as a lens for public opinion, this paper highlights the spatial distribution of social media platform users’ most widespread discussion topics regarding COVID-19, vaccinations, mask mandates, social distancing, quarantines, and shelter-in-place procedures. While this paper analyzes Twitter data, we only utilize posts from January 2020-January 2022, before the platform became “X” under Elon Musk. Using topic modeling and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) as an intermediate step in analyzing the spatial distribution of topics across geographic scales, we examined more than five-million Tweets from 1 January 2020 to 1 January 2022. Analyzation of the Twitter data with LDA provided eight dominant topics, from COVID-19 misinformation to vaccine requirements at school. Through Twitter geolocation information, each topic shows a unique spatial distribution across the contiguous United States. Analyzing and interpreting the prevalence of these topics allows policymakers to better understand sentiments regarding COVID-19 and related public health campaigns at the community and state levels.

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