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CHICAGO - Public attitude toward COVID-19 and its treatments is more infectious than the disease itself, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze tweets about the virus. Researchers studied the influence of Twitter on COVID-19 health beliefs as well as the competing influence of scientific evidence versus the speeches of politicians.
The study s key findings:
People s biases are magnified when they read tweets about COVID-19 from other users, and the more times it has been retweeted, the more they tend to believe it and retweet it themselves.
Scientific events, such as scientific publications, and non-scientific events, such as speeches of politicians, equally influence health belief trends on social media.