Public Health Emergencies and Public Opinion on Social Media: A Framing and Network Agenda-Setting Study of Covid-19

The COVID-19 pandemic was a public health crisis in 2020 and 2021, leading to a global quarantine. It motivated millions of people worldwide to share quintillions of information about various aspects of the disease on social media. Analyzing public opinion on social media can identify the needs and preferences of citizens and guide governments and health authorities in policy and decision-making. Despite a few recent studies that have analyzed social media concerning the COVID-19 crisis, public opinion about the pandemic is still an understudied area. To fill this gap, this study used framing theory and thematic analysis to analyze 22 trending hashtags and 694,582 tweets containing them to (a) identify the frames in public discourse on Twitter about the COVID-19 pandemic, and (b) the amount of public attention to those frames. Findings contribute to the framing theory by demonstrating how trending hashtags can be used to identify frames on social media. It concludes that the identified themes and frames represent the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The consequences could be (a) exclusively related to COVID-19, such as hand hygiene or isolation, (b) related to any health crisis such as social support of vulnerable groups, and (c) generic that are irrespective of COVID-19, such as homeschooling or remote working. Additionally, this study used content analysis to (a) determine the topics presented in 7,090 tweets posted by WHO on Twitter in the first half of 2020 (i.e., WHO’s agenda), and employed the network agenda-setting theory and statistical tests to (b) examine the effect of WHO’s agenda on 7.5 million of its followers on Twitter, specifically six Twitter user categories. Findings inform the agenda-setting theory by demonstrating a two-way agenda-setting effect where WHO impacts the agendas of Twitter user categories, and the Twitter user categories also impact WHO’s agenda.