How Italy Tweeted about COVID-19: Detecting Reactions to the Pandemic from Social Media

Valentina Lorenzoni, Gianni Andreozzi, Andrea Bazzani, Virginia Casigliani, Salvatore Pirri, Lara Tavoschi and Giuseppe Turchetti
Additional contact information
Valentina Lorenzoni: Institute of Management and Department of Excellence EMbeDS, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, 56127 Pisa, Italy
Gianni Andreozzi: Institute of Management and Department of Excellence EMbeDS, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, 56127 Pisa, Italy
Andrea Bazzani: Institute of Management and Department of Excellence EMbeDS, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, 56127 Pisa, Italy
Virginia Casigliani: Department of Translational Research and New Technologies in Medicine and Surgery, University of Pisa, 56126 Pisa, Italy
Salvatore Pirri: Institute of Management and Department of Excellence EMbeDS, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, 56127 Pisa, Italy
Lara Tavoschi: Department of Translational Research and New Technologies in Medicine and Surgery, University of Pisa, 56126 Pisa, Italy
Giuseppe Turchetti: Institute of Management and Department of Excellence EMbeDS, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, 56127 Pisa, Italy

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 13, 1-14

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic required communities throughout the world to deal with unknown threats. Using Twitter data, this study aimed to detect reactions to the outbreak in Italy and to evaluate the relationship between measures derived from social media (SM) with both national epidemiological data and reports on the violations of the restrictions. The dynamics of time-series about tweets counts, emotions expressed, and themes discussed were evaluated using Italian posts regarding COVID-19 from 25 February to 4 May 2020. Considering 4,988,255 tweets, results highlight that emotions changed significantly over time with anger, disgust, fear, and sadness showing a downward trend, while joy, trust, anticipation, and surprise increased. The trend of emotions correlated significantly with national variation in confirmed cases and reports on the violations of restrictive measures. The study highlights the potential of using SM to assess emotional and behavioural reactions, delineating their possible contribution to the establishment of a decision management system during emergencies.

Keywords: COVID-19; social media; Twitter; health emergency; emotional and behavioural reaction; emergency management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/13/7785/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/13/7785/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:13:p:7785-:d:847331

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().