How epidemic psychology works on Twitter

We studied the language of 122M tweets related to the pandemic

1 / 6

2 / 6

3 / 6

4 / 6

5 / 6

6 / 6

❮ ❯

How does it work?

Philip Strong, the founder of the sociological study of epidemic infectious diseases, observed that the chaos resulting from an epidemic turns out to be more predictable than what one would initially expect. Hitherto, there has never been any large-scale empirical study of whether the evolution of an epidemic reflects Strong’s model, not least because of lack of data. COVID-19 has recently changed that: it has been the first epidemic in history in which people around the world have been collectively expressing their thoughts and concerns on social media.

During 2020, based on changes on the use of language on Twitter, three distinct phases were identified. The first was the refusal phase: people in the US refused to accept reality despite the increasing numbers of deaths in other countries. The second was the anger phase, started after the announcement of the first death in the country: people’s fear translated into anger about the looming feeling that things were about to change. The third phase was the acceptance phase, started after the authorities imposed physical-distancing measures: people found a “new normal” for their daily activities. During the year, as cases surged in waves, so did anger, re-emerging cyclically at each wave. These results suggest the concrete future possibility of embedding epidemic psychology derived from the use of language on social media into more traditional epidemiological models.