Social media and public perception as core aspect of public health: The cautionary case of @realdonaldtrump and COVID-19.

Agustín Fuentes,Jeffrey V Peterson,Siân E Halcrow

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0251179

Agustín Fuentes, Jeffrey V Peterson + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251179

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: May 5, 2021
Citations: 24	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Princeton University, University of Notre Dame

Abstract

The social media milieu in which we are enmeshed has substantive impacts on our beliefs and perceptions. Recent work has established that this can play a role in influencing understanding of, and reactions to, public health information. Twitter, in particular, appears to play a substantive role in the public health information ecosystem. From July 25th, 2020 to November 15th, 2020, we collected weekly tweets related to COVID19 keywords and assessed their networks, patterns and properties. Our analyses revealed the dominance of a handful of individual accounts as central structuring agents in the networks of tens of thousands of tweets and retweets, and thus millions of views, related to specific COVID19 keywords. These few individual accounts and the content of their tweets, mentions, and retweets are substantially overrepresented in terms of public exposure to, and thus interaction with, critical elements of public health information in the pandemic. Here we report on one particularly striking aspect of our dataset: the prominent position of @realdonaldtrump in Twitter networks related to four key terms of the COVID19 pandemic in 2020.

Highlights

The social media milieu in which we are enmeshed has substantive impacts on our beliefs, actions and reactions to information, and is a relevant arena for understanding public health
While we found a number of different twitter accounts scored high in one or more of our network measures in different weeks across the entire survey period, @realdonaldtrump was the top or in the top two in in-degree and betweenness centrality, and Adjusted Influence Centrality (AIC), across the entire data collection period for the following four keywords: “Fauci,” “Mask,” “Open,” and “Social distancing,” with one exception (Table 1)
Our assessment of Twitter patterns related to the COVID19 pandemic offers a cautionary tale for public health

Summary

Introduction

The social media milieu in which we are enmeshed has substantive impacts on our beliefs, actions and reactions to information, and is a relevant arena for understanding public health. Social media is a major factor in the exposure to information and the structuring of social/cultural landscapes in the contemporary world [2]. As humans receive social/cultural information, we create mental representations and neural connections, developing ideas, understandings and beliefs that become neurobiological, social, and psychological processes influencing how we see and experience the world, with popular, socially pervasive and central cultural figures/concepts having disproportionate influence [3,4,5]. Social media exposure and engagement influences the tone, tenor and content of public perceptions, and action, in a variety of arenas (e.g. politics [6]), and there is substantive evidence that social media is intricately involved with health [7].

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