Twitter and Middle East respiratory syndrome, South Korea, 2015: A multi-lingual study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Different linguo-cultural communities might react to an outbreak differently. The 2015 South Korean MERS outbreak presented an opportunity for us to compare tweets responding to the same outbreak in different languages.

Methods

We obtained a 1% sample through Twitter streaming application programming interface from June 1 to 30, 2015. We identified MERS-related tweets with keywords such as 'MERS' and its translation in five different languages. We translated non-English tweets into English for statistical comparison.

Results

We retrieved MERS-related Twitter data in five languages: Korean (N = 21,823), English (N = 4024), Thai (N = 2084), Japanese (N = 1334) and Indonesian (N = 1256). Categories of randomly selected user profiles (p < 0.001) and the top 30

SUBMITTER: Fung IC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7185480 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature