Liana Ermakova
ABSTRACT
The news and stories that people find credible can influence the adoption of public health policies and determine their response to the pandemic, including the reception of controversial treatments. Although we trust people we know or admire, we should ask ourselves if they are sufficiently competent to provide a reliable opinion about medical treatments. In this paper, we try to identify professions, political views and psychological characteristics of Twitter users who shared information about controversial medical treatments by analysing the profile data of tweets published in English during the Covid-19 pandemic. We found that profile descriptions of Twitter users are very heterogeneous, but the major categories of users are Christians, devoted family members, fans of different music or political parties. We proposed an automatic approach for user classification.
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Index Terms
- Analysis of Users Engaged in Online Discussions about Controversial Covid-19 Treatments
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