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Stringent COVID-19 government restrictions were associated with a marked increase in Twitter activity in Europe

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  • Millard, Joe
  • Akimova, Evelina Tamerlanov
  • Ding, Xuejie
  • Leasure, Douglas
  • Zhao, Bo
  • Mills, Melinda

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented effect on health, well-being, and socioeconomic conditions worldwide. One consequence was changes in social media activity, disruption of schedules, and potentially sleep. We use Twitter data to explore changes in daily and nightly online activity at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Using a pseudo-random sample of 2,489 users across 6 cities in the UK (Aberdeen, Belfast, Bristol, Cardiff, London, and Manchester), 4 cities in Italy (Milan, Naples, Rome, and Turin), and 4 cities in Sweden (Göteborg, Malmo, Stockholm, Uppsala), we test the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic changed online activity in Europe. Using a dataset of ~24 million tweets, we show that tweet activity increased by ~20% in 2020 relative to the previous non-pandemic year of 2019. We further show that tweet activity is associated with the degree of government response to COVID-19, particularly during the day, and that the stringency of restrictions was the strongest predictive component of change in tweet count.

Suggested Citation

  • Millard, Joe & Akimova, Evelina Tamerlanov & Ding, Xuejie & Leasure, Douglas & Zhao, Bo & Mills, Melinda, 2023. "Stringent COVID-19 government restrictions were associated with a marked increase in Twitter activity in Europe," SocArXiv g9apk, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:g9apk
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/g9apk
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