Geolocated tweets in our analysis
The Twitter Social Mobility Index, a measure of social distancing and travel derived from public geolocated Twitter data, measures average travel each week. Twitter users can publicly share their location data with a tweet. We then measure how much a user moves around in a given week by computing the variance of their movement from a central location. We aggregate over cities, states and the entire United States.
Understanding the amount of reduction in social contact and travel in different geographic regions can be an important aspect to measuring the effectiveness of social distancing policies. This is especially true as these policies remain in effect for an extended period of time, and the public may begin to relax their implementation.
Twitter users in our analysis
Social distancing is an important component of the response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Minimizing social interactions and travel reduces the rate at which the infection spreads, and "flattens the curve" such that the medical system can better treat infected individuals.
covid19dataresources.org: COVID-19 related social media and web data resources.
twitterdata.covid19dataresources.org: A COVID-19 related Twitter dataset.
We are a team of academic researchers who utilize web and social media data to study public health. We develop novel natural language processing and machine learning models and apply them to social media datasets. You can learn more about our work at:
Professor Mark Dredze is the John C Malone Associate Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.
See ProfileProfessor David Broniatowski is an Associate Professor of of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at George Washington University.
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