Discussions of the Swine Flu and Ebola Epidemics on Twitter

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Wasim Ahmed, whose focus is on discussions of infectious diseases on Twitter. Such diseases can be very deadly, and when outbreaks occur they lead to the public expression of people’s views and opinions via social media. There’s a need to further understand such communication processes, beyond mere metrics, through qualitative and mixed-methods approaches.

The present paper focusses especially on the peaks of the 2009 swine flu and 2014 Ebola outbreaks. What did English-language Twitter users discuss during these times, how do these events compare with each other, and are there indications of a moral panic around them? (Other moral panics include the 16th-century witch craze or the War on Drugs of the 20th century.)

The project built on datasets of several 100,000 tweets per case that contained keywords such as swine flu and Ebola, from which some thousands of tweets were coded manually. Across the two events, there are a number of similarities, including the presence of fear and anger as well as downplaying of the seriousness of the crisis, discussion about prevention and symptoms, information seeking, discussions about the economic impact, and comments on the political response. The Ebola crisis showed more linking to Instagram, which had not been a prominent platform during the swine flu crisis; the swine flu crisis contained more discussion of the name swine flu, which shifted undue attention to pigs and pork products (which are not a major infection vector).