Public Engagement with Science via Social Media: A Case of Communicating the Pandemic on Twitter

Abstract

The poster describes a project which analyzes interactions between laypeople and experts via social media. Our aim is to understand how experts and the general public interact with each other on social media, and how we can use current data to improve these interactions in the future. We created a Twitter bot to obtain data from 15 COVID-19 experts and 7 federal government-sponsored public health organizations from English-speaking countries. The data were analyzed in R to investigate the relationships among Followers, Favorites, Retweets, and Hashtag Count per tweet. The preliminary analysis indicated statistically significant differences between various variables including: Number of Favorites, Number of Retweets, Number of Hashtags, and Number of Followers; the results shed light on the current relationship between the public and experts on social media.