Using Tweets to Understand How COVID-19–Related Health Beliefs Are Affected in the Age of Social Media: Twitter Data Analysis Study

Abstract

As an analogy of the classic epidemiology model where an infection is considered to be spreading in a population with an R₀ greater than 1, we found that the number of users tweeting about COVID-19 health beliefs was amplifying in an epidemic manner and could partially intensify the infodemic. It is "unhealthy" that both scientific and nonscientific events constitute no disparity in impacting the health belief trends on Twitter, since nonscientific events, such as politicians' speeches, might not be endorsed by substantial evidence and could sometimes be misleading.