Yigitcanlar Tan, Kankanamge Nayomi, Preston Alexander, Gill Palvinderjit Singh, Rezayee Maqsood, Ostadnia Mahsan, Xia Bo, Ioppolo Giuseppe
School of Built Environment, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George Street, Brisbane, QLD 4000 Australia.
Department of Architecture, Nangarhar University, Kabul-Jalal Abad Highway, Jalalabad, Nangarhar 2601 Afghanistan.
Health Inf Sci Syst. 2020 Oct 15;8(1):37. doi: 10.1007/s13755-020-00121-9. eCollection 2020 Dec.
Due to COVID-19, various countries introduced lockdowns and limited citizen movements. These restrictions triggered an increased use of digital technologies and platforms by the public. This provides an opportunity for the authorities to capture public perceptions on COVID-19 from social media channels to make informed decisions. The use of social media analytics during pandemics for decision-making, however, is an understudied area of research. Thus, this study aims to generate insights into how social media analytics can assist authorities in pandemic-related policy decisions.
This study involved a social media analysis approach-i.e., systematic geo-Twitter analysis-that contains descriptive, content, sentiment, and spatial analyses. Australian states and territories are selected as the case study context for the empirical investigation. This study collected 96,666 geotagged tweets (originated from Australia between 1 January and 4 May 2020), and analysed 35,969 of them after data cleaning.
The findings disclose that: (a) Social media analytics is an efficient approach to capture the attitudes and perceptions of the public during a pandemic; (b) Crowdsourced social media data can guide interventions and decisions of the authorities during a pandemic, and; (c) Effective use of government social media channels can help the public to follow the introduced measures/restrictions.
The findings are invaluable for authorities to understand community perceptions and identify communities in needs and demands in a pandemic situation, where authorities are not in a position to conduct direct and lengthily public consultations.
由于新冠疫情，各国实施了封锁措施并限制公民行动。这些限制促使公众更多地使用数字技术和平台。这为当局提供了一个机会，可从社交媒体渠道获取公众对新冠疫情的看法，以便做出明智决策。然而，在疫情期间利用社交媒体分析进行决策是一个研究较少的领域。因此，本研究旨在深入了解社交媒体分析如何协助当局做出与疫情相关的政策决策。
本研究采用了一种社交媒体分析方法，即系统的地理推特分析，其中包括描述性、内容、情感和空间分析。选择澳大利亚的州和领地作为实证研究的案例背景。本研究收集了96,666条带有地理标签的推文（于2020年1月1日至5月4日发自澳大利亚），并在数据清理后对其中35,969条进行了分析。
研究结果表明：（a）社交媒体分析是在疫情期间获取公众态度和看法的有效方法；（b）众包的社交媒体数据可在疫情期间指导当局的干预措施和决策；（c）有效利用政府社交媒体渠道可帮助公众遵守所实施的措施/限制。
这些发现对于当局了解社区看法以及在疫情形势下识别有需求的社区非常宝贵，因为当局无法进行直接且冗长的公众咨询。
