Methods
- We analysed 7.9 million tweets from users located in Austria by Crimson Hexagon. Only original tweets (no retweets) in German and from users with a number of followers between 100 and 50.000 (to remove spam and media) were included.
- Tweet text is matched for anxiety terms from the LIWC lexicon. LIWC is a standard methodology in psychology for text analysis that includes validated lexica in German.
- Similarly, tweet text was matched to a list of prosocial terms used in previous research, including for example words related to helping, empathy, cooperating, sharing, volunteering, and donating. We excluded words referring to (1) health (e.g. Heilverfahren, Behandlung, Behandlungen), (2) service (Dienst*, mostly comments about the public services and availability of other services during the Corona-crisis), (3) sharing words (teilen, mitteilen). We did this to avoid confounds with non-prosocial tweets about Covid-19 related health- and other services, and about sharing of links/tweets/videos, etc.
- Marked dates during the Covid-19 outbreak are taken from Wikipedia.
Anxiety
In both figures below, the lines indicate the following events:
- Red:
- Terrorist attack in Christchurch on 2019-03-15
- Terrorist attack in Halle on 2019-10-09
- Terrorist attack in Hanau on 2020-02-25
- Yellow: Christmas and New Years eve
- Green: First Covid_-19 case on 2020-02-25
- Orange: First death from Covid-19 on 2020-03-12
- Turquois: Social distancing measures announced on 2020-03-15, starting on the day after
Observations for anxiety
- A typical day in Austria shows a frequency of anxiety terms in Twitter of about 2.8%.
- The highest values in the last year are related to terrorist attacks, with around 4.5% of tweets containing anxiety related words. Although these increases were very strong, they never lasted long. Instead, anxiety levels quickly returned back to the previous level.
- Events around Covid-19 are related to a high percentage of tweets containing anxiety-related words with more than 4%. In contrast to the terrorist attacks, the level stays high, with repeated peaks related to the first case and the first death, as well as the announcement of the obligatory social distancing measures.
- The highest peak during the period of evolving Covid-19 events is 4.5%. This is about 2% more than on average days, and corresponds to an increase by about 50% compared to levels in 2019.
Prosocial behavior since the outbreak of Covid-19
In most countries in which expressions of anxiety have risen since the outbreak of Covid-19, expressions of empathy, willingness to support each other and cooperate (in short, prosocial behavior) have increased as well. The increase begins at different moments in different countries, probably depending on which information people had about Covid-19 in other countries, and on which measures were communicated in what way by their governments.
In the plot below, the lines indicate the following events:
- Blue: The first press conference on Covid-19, announcing bans of large public events and university closures as first measures, on 2020-03-10
- Grey: 27 February 2020: Since the outbreak of Covid-19, the day on which levels of prosociality in tweets increase above the average level from 2019 and remain high for several days in a row.
- Green: First Covid_-19 case on 2020-02-25
- Orange: First death from Covid-19 on 2020-03-12
- Turquois: Social distancing measures announced on 2020-03-15, starting on the day after
Observations for prosocial behavior
- Since Covid-19 and measures by the government are a topic of public attention in Austria, the proportion of tweets referring to prosocial behavior and feelings has clearly increased, with maximal increases of about 18% compared to the averge level in 2019.
- In comparison to other countries, levels started rising quite early, i.e. on 27 February just after the first death in Austria. Average levels after 27 February are about 9% higher than levels in the two months before that date.
Conclusions
- It is clear that the events around the outbreak of Covid-19 and the communication of measures taken in response have increased levels of anxiety expressed in tweets. The increase of about 50% seems to last longer than what was observed for terrorist attacks in the last year.
- Expressions of willingness to help have also increased by 18% in comparison to 2019. This shows that people were not only expressing more anxiety, but also increasingly talking about cooperation, supporting each other and expressing empathy for people who are in some way concerned by Covid-19.
- Interestingly, tweets referring to prosocial behavior showed a first strong peak in the beginning of March, but decreased again. This first peak could be related to information Austrian Twitter users already had about events in Italy, and empathy they expressed for what was happening there.
- In Austria, the first measures were announced on March 10th, including a ban of large public events and closures of universities during the first press conference. From this day on, tweets referring to prosocial behavior have risen steadily. The pattern of spikes that was observed before Covid-19 does no longer continue, instead, the level of prosociality has remained high for a month in a row. Such an enduring increase has not even been observed after the terrorist attacks in Paris.
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