Attention dynamics on the Chinese social media Sina Weibo during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT: Understanding attention dynamics on social media during pandemics could help governments minimize the effects. We focus on how COVID-19 has influenced the attention dynamics on the biggest Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo during the first four months of the pandemic. We study the real-time Hot Search List (HSL), which provides the ranking of the most popular 50 hashtags based on the amount of Sina Weibo searches. We show how the specific events, measures and developments during the epidemic affected the emergence of different kinds of hashtags and the ranking on the HSL. A significant increase of COVID-19 related hashtags started to occur on HSL around January 20, 2020, when the transmission of the disease between humans was announced. Then very rapidly a situation was reached wher

SUBMITTER: Cui H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7856455 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature