“Fake news spreads faster and easier than this virus, and it’s just as dangerous.” Researchers at Heilbronn University have now backed up this statement by WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus from mid-February 2020. By analyzing sent them have made, they identified that information about the coronavirus are mostly shared from sources in social media.

Don’t miss any news! With our daily newsletter you will receive all the news from heise online every morning from the past 24 hours.

It is hardly surprising that most tweets on the subject of coronavirus share tweets. In second place we refer to Youtube, followed by Instagram, Paper.li, Facebook and Linkedin. The first source that is not a social medium is the British newspaper The Guardian on.

The most widespread category among the top 50 was “mainstream or local news”, counted the researchers at the GECKO Institute for Medicine, Computer Science and Economics at the HHN. For the category “Government and Public Health Care” found among the top 50 with the Centers for Disease Control and -prevention (CDC) of the USA and the WHO two channels of information.

The specialist magazine Nature is ranked 116 the most widespread scientific publication; it appeared in 6043 tweets. “What is interesting about this is that original scientific sources are rarely shared directly. This underlines the importance of the media in communicating complex issues in a language that is easy to understand for the general public,” says GECKO employee Monika Pobiruchin. It is important that new scientific knowledge is continuously gained and that the origin and seriousness of information on the subject of Covid – 19 must be observed.

Most frequent hashtags For the study, which was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the researchers used the Twitter Streaming API to collect tweets from February 9th, which were linked to the 16 prevailing hashtags on the topic. They were evaluated using Java software that filtered out duplicate tweets and retweets, extracted the text of the tweets, the metadata and profile information and stored them in a PostgreSQL database. The data was statistically evaluated using the R software on an Ubuntu computer. The Heilbronn researchers used the methods and categories that the social medicine specialist Gunther Eysenbach 2009 had used on the occasion of the H1N1 pandemic .

The most common hashtag was #coronavirus, followed by #covid 19 and #COVID – 19. 000, 8 million of the examined tweets were in English, 3 million in Spanish . German-language tweets were around 2009. 000. Almost twice as many tweets were in Italian. “It is noteworthy that the population in the north of Italy received information on Covid early on, at the end of February – 19 has spread more on Twitter “, explains the Heilbronn researcher Martin Wiesner. “In the following weeks, this effect was also clearly noticeable in other European countries.”

Origin of the tweets on the subject of coronavirus collected at seven-day intervals between February 9 and 11. April 2020.

(Source: GECKO Institute for Medicine, Computer Science and Economics at the HHN) Tweets with geographical coordinates were under-analyzed and shown and animated in a seven-day interval on a map of Europe. It can be seen that at the beginning of the study period there were frequent Covid tweets in densely populated regions in the UK, Benelux and Italy, with geolocation data available for one million, or 4.4 percent, of the tweets n that their results are probably not transferable to other social media platforms such as Facebook or Reddit. The relatively sparse data situation for Eastern Europe could be due to the fact that Twitter is used little or cautiously there.

(anw)