Related papers: Doctors vs. Nurses: Understanding the Great Divide…
Online discussions of science involve complex interactions among experts, news media, and social media users as they interpret and disseminate scientific findings. While prior work has examined these actors in isolation, their interplay in…
Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…
Public health measures were among the most polarizing topics debated online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the discussion surrounded specific events, such as when and which particular interventions came into practise. In this work,…
Understanding how different online communities engage with COVID-19 misinformation is critical for public health response, as misinformation confined to a small, isolated community of users poses a different public health risk than…
The novel coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage communities across the US. Opinion surveys identified importance of political ideology in shaping perceptions of the pandemic and compliance with preventive measures. Here, we use social…
We present preliminary results on the online war surrounding distrust of expertise in medical science -- specifically, the issue of vaccinations. While distrust and misinformation in politics can damage democratic elections, in the medical…
While COVID-19 vaccines are finally becoming widely available, a second pandemic that revolves around the circulation of anti-vaxxer fake news may hinder efforts to recover from the first one. With this in mind, we performed an extensive…
Opposition and hesitancy to vaccination have been one of the major threats to global health. Social media sites have been suspected as a breeding ground of misleading narratives about vaccines, but little is known about how pervasive…
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has been testing every society and exposing the critical role of local politics in crisis response. In the United States, there has been a strong partisan divide between the Democratic and…
Purpose: Public attitudes towards COVID-19 and social distancing are critical in reducing its spread. It is therefore important to understand public reactions and information dissemination in all major forms, including on social media. This…
The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 resulted in large volumes of data shared on different social media platforms. Analyzing and visualizing these data is doubtlessly essential to having a deep understanding of the pandemic's impacts on people's…
Mass vaccination remains a long-lasting challenge for disease control and prevention with upticks in vaccine hesitancy worldwide. Here, we introduce an experience-based learning (Q-learning) dynamics model of vaccination behavior in social…
ChatGPT is a popular information system (over 1 billion visits in August 2023) that can generate natural language responses to user queries. It is important to study the quality and equity of its responses on health-related topics, such as…
At the time of this study, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic has spread significantly across the world. Considering the uncertainty about policies, health risks, financial difficulties, etc. the online media, specially…
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new opportunities for health communication, including an increase in the public use of online outlets for health-related emotions. People have turned to social media networks to share sentiments related…
The spread of coronavirus and anti-vaccine conspiracies online hindered public health responses to the pandemic. We examined the content of external articles shared on Twitter from February to June 2020 to understand how conspiracy theories…
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a need for widespread and rapid vaccine development. As several vaccines have recently been approved for human use or are in different stages of development, governments across the world are preparing…
The global spread of COVID-19 has caused pandemics to be widely discussed. This is evident in the large number of scientific articles and the amount of user-generated content on social media. This paper aims to compare academic…
Preliminary evidence suggests that women, including female researchers, are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of unequal distribution of childcare, elderly care and other kinds of domestic and emotional labor.…
COVID-19 related policies were extensively politicized during the 2020 election year of the United States, resulting in polarizing viewpoints. Twitter users were particularly engaged during the 2020 election year. Here we investigated…