Methods
- We analysed 99.5 million tweets from users located in Italy by Crimson Hexagon. Only original tweets (no retweets) in Italian and from users with a number of followers between 100 and 100.000 (to remove spam and media) were included.
- To analyse anxiety, tweet text was matched for anxiety terms from the LIWC lexicon. LIWC is a standard methodology in psychology for text analysis that includes validated lexica in Italian.
- 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, (2) service (mostly comments about the public services and availability of other services during the Corona-crisis), and (3) sharing words. 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, New Zealand on 2019-03-05
- Yellow: Christmas and New Years eve
- Green: First Covid19 case on 2020-01-31
- Orange: First death from Covid 19 on 2020-02-22
- Turquois: Nationwide quarantine on 2020-03-09
Observations for anxiety
- A typical day in Italy shows a frequency of anxiety terms in Twitter of about 2.3%. The lowest days in 2019 are Christmas, as expected.
- The first cases of Covid-10 led to the highest value so far, with more than 3%.
- The first deaths created the highest value in our time series at above 4%. This is close to double the frequency of anxiety terms as on a normal day in Italy in 2019.
- The level has stayed elevated after that with another peak when the mass quarantine started, corresponding to a change of about 75% compared to the 2019 baseline.
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.
The lines in the plot below indicate the following events:
- Green: First Covid19 case on 2020-01-31
- Orange: First death from Covid 19 on 2020-02-22
- Grey: 29 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.
- Turquois: Nationwide quarantine on 2020-03-09
Observations for prosocial behavior
- After the outbreak of Covid-19, levels started rising from 29 February on. The strongest increase occurred when the nationwide quarantine and calls for donations to hospitals were announced.
Conclusions
- Italian Twitter users are clearly reacting to the news about COVID19, showing signs of anxiety, fear, and worry.
- A doubling of anxiety terms is not negligible. This is similar to the jump we observed in French after the Paris terrorist attacks.
- A sustained elevated level of anxiety terms is rare, it has stayed high for weeks in Italy, while in Paris it came back to normal about 10 days after the attacks.
- Since the outbreak of Covid-19, levels of tweets mentioning helping, empahty, cooperation, sharing etc. have strongly risen and remained high for several weeks in a row. This has not occured before in the time period analysed.
- Our results show that people in Italy are not just afraid of the virus, but also increasingly willing to help each other.
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