Social media mining under the COVID-19 context: Progress, challenges, and opportunities

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2022.102967Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • This review summarizes the progress of social media data mining studies in the COVID-19 contexts.

  • This review documents essential features of publicly available COVID-19 related social media data archives.

  • This review discusses challenges in social media analytics associated with their potential impacts on derived COVID-19 findings.

  • This review presents visions for the possible paths forward regarding social media-based investigations on COVID-19 and other public health emergencies.

Abstract

Social media platforms allow users worldwide to create and share information, forging vast sensing networks that allow information on certain topics to be collected, stored, mined, and analyzed in a rapid manner. During the COVID-19 pandemic, extensive social media mining efforts have been undertaken to tackle COVID-19 challenges from various perspectives. This review summarizes the progress of social media data mining studies in the COVID-19 contexts and categorizes them into six major domains, including early warning and detection, human mobility monitoring, communication and information conveying, public attitudes and emotions, infodemic and misinformation, and hatred and violence. We further document essential features of publicly available COVID-19 related social media data archives that will benefit research communities in conducting replicable and reproducible studies. In addition, we discuss seven challenges in social media analytics associated with their potential impacts on derived COVID-19 findings, followed by our visions for the possible paths forward in regard to social media-based COVID-19 investigations. This review serves as a valuable reference that recaps social media mining efforts in COVID-19 related studies and provides future directions along which the information harnessed from social media can be used to address public health emergencies.

Keywords

COVID-19
Pandemic
Social media
Big data
Data mining

Cited by (0)