A team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are exploring how online message board such as Reddit can be used to track surges in interest and commentary about health topics such as COVID-19. The hope is this sort of monitoring could help health officials better understand public sentiment on education, concerns and priorities during crises like the Coronavirus pandemic.
Earlier this month, the Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health presented work on how tracking Twitter can help to locate the next potential hotspots for COVID-19 infections. In this latest study, the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania shifted to monitoring public discussion boards by utilizing artificial intelligence.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are exploring Reddit as a tool for tracking COVID-19 ... [+]
As published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, researchers say they chose to evaluate discussions on Reddit because it is “one of the most popular sites on the internet, as well as being relatively unfiltered and up-to-date.”
In their report, researchers claim real-time monitoring of Reddit could have allowed for a more efficient public health response during the early phases of Coronavirus in mid-March. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did not issue official guidelines for safely visiting many public areas until early April. The PENN team proposes needed guidance could have gone out closer to the period of peak interest if there had been more monitoring of online discussions
PENN Medicine’s analysis sets up Reddit as a sort of broadcast frequency tuned directly to the thoughts of the online public — or at least a good portion of it. Reddit became a prime focus for this study as the message boards can also serve as focal points for misinformation about COVID-19, its symptoms, its spread, its causes, etc. Machine monitoring of the message boards can also help to catalog the varieties of false information.
PENN Medicine researchers propose monitoring Reddit boards could help catalog COVID-19 ... [+]
To identify surges of Coronavirus interest within the public, the study’s investigators collected nearly 95,000 posts from March 3 through March 31, 2020 on the most popular COVID-19 Reddit thread, “r/Coronavirus.” The team tagged 50 different discussion topics through a machine learning technique of natural language processing. Eventually, 10 of those topics were pegged as the most closely related to three areas of interest: 1) The response to public health measures; 2) The sense of the pandemic’s severity; 3) Coronavirus impact on daily life.
By tracking how the popularity of such topics varied from day to day, the PENN study organizers demonstrate how areas of concern fluctuated. The results list examples such as hand-washing as peaking between March 3 and 6. Worry about personal finances was discussed about 50% more at the end of March than a few weeks earlier.
