Exploring the Dissemination of Situational Information on Twitter during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has caused severe global morbidity and mortality. As of early March 2022, more than 48 billion cases of COVID-19 and over 5.96 million deaths have been confirmed across 110 countries. During the pandemic, social media such as Twitter have become popular platforms for the public to acquire information, communicate and share opinions. News agencies and public health authorities also use Twitter to publish health-related news and policies. These have led to a continuously increasing number of tweets. Twitter has become an important data source for public health authorities to study and monitor the topics and discussions published by news agencies and public health authorities on Twitter so that they can adjust their communication strategies and respond to public concerns. This research selected tweets data from four news agencies and four public health authorities from the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic covering 21 weeks from January 1 to May 21 2020. The aims of this study are: (1) to understand and uncover the main topics these news agencies and public health authorities published at the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, (2) to investigate how these topics changed in these news agencies and public health authorities tweets during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, (3) to identify differences in topics between news agencies and the health authorities published on Twitter.