Social media and COVID‐19: Can social distancing be quantified without measuring human movements?. Issue 1 (22nd October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Anderson, Mackenzie; Karami, Amir; Bozorgi, Parisa
• Is Part Of: Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Volume 57:Issue 1(2020)
• Page Start: n/a
• Page End: n/a
• Publication Date: 2020-10-22
• Subjects: COVID‐19 -- social media -- social distancing -- twitter; Information science -- Congresses; Information technology -- Congresses; Information science; Information technology; Conference papers and proceedings; 020
• DOI: 10.1002/pra2.378
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2373-9231

Abstract

Abstract: The COVID‐19 outbreak has posed significant threats to international health and the economy. In the absence of treatment for this virus, public health officials asked the public to practice social distancing to reduce the number of physical contacts. However, quantifying social distancing is a challenging task and current methods are based on human movements. We propose a time and cost‐effective approach to measure how people practice social distancing. This study proposes a new method based on utilizing the frequency of hashtags supporting and encouraging social distancing for measuring social distancing. We have identified 18 related hashtags and tracked their trends between Jan and May 2020. Our evaluation results show that there is a strong correlation ( p < .05) between our findings and the Google social distancing report.