Coronavirus: Twitterati trends air world of confusion

Australians tweeted about panic buying more than any other country, especially about toilet paper and limits on alcohol purchases.

Machine learning researcher Caitlin Doogan.

Australians tweeted about panic buying more than any other country, especially about toilet paper and limits on alcohol purchases. These were some of the findings of an analysis of three million postings on social network Twitter.

Researchers at Melbourne’s Monash University focused on tweets in six countries to distil ­issues that most concerned the public. The study looked at attitudes in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Britain and the US. Empathy, logic, consistency and explanations about restrictions were key to public acceptance of government rules.

Machine learning researcher Caitlin Doogan, who led the project, said that in early March when the pandemic reached Australia, there was a rapid ­influx of people on Twitter and opinions and attitudes were changing quickly.

“Interestingly, of all the countries I studied except for New Zealand that already had the lockdown … people were crying out for the restrictions, they wanted them brought on really quickly and they wanted them hard and fast,” Ms Doogan said. “It seemed logical: let’s get it done, let’s cut it off, let’s get it eradicated in Australia. There really wasn’t much discontent around these restrictions.”

Inconsistencies sparked unhappiness; for example, the 30-minute rule for hairdressing appointments. And there was confusion in Victoria over clamping down on fishing and golf, but they were a minority. “The majority were going, ‘Yes it’s an inconvenience but just deal with it and stop being a whingeing person’,” she said.

Ms Doogan said Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’s recent bid to declare a state of emergency for 12 months was interpreted online as extending lockdowns and provoked a Twitter “explosion”.

She said damage to the economy was second to health concerns early but things were changing. Mental health, suicide prevention, and how economic destruction would impact younger people longer were more prevalent now. She said governments had to seek information on how their messaging impacted communities to avoid missteps. Leaders needed to show empathy.

While Mr Andrews came across as committed, he doesn’t show enough empathy. Kindness and empathy had been a hallmark of the response of New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern. “Daniel Andrews will stand up there and he’ll say the words: ‘The majority of people are doing the right thing’, and it‘s almost got a negative tilt as if we weren’t doing the right thing beforehand.

An analysis of tweets found that in the early stages, people accepted lockdowns if they were implemented quickly and decisively. Prolonged, staggered or delayed implementation of restrictions on gatherings was met by an angry and fearful public response.

Australian and Irish users perceived frivolous fines based on ambiguous rules to be a revenue raising activity. Ireland‘s delay in shutting pubs and clubs for St Patrick’s Day frustrated users juggling working from home with home schooling children.

UK tweets expressed anxiety and sadness. The availability and expense of mental health services was perceived poorly.

Australians made repeated reference to the decisions over non-essential service closures, specifically about the restrictions on mourners at funerals and the allowance of hair salons to remain open.

Racially charged language and use of anti-China hashtags to signal tweets about COVID-19 were almost exclusive to the US.

New Zealand displayed the greatest acceptance of public health measures, while the US showed the lowest. This was in spite of these countries having the most and least restrictive of public health measures respectively.

In the early pandemic, there were factors such as the u-turn on rules and attitudes about masks.

Advice on government communication measures.

Rather than wanting to mimic American culture, people generally were aghast at the situation in New York but “the conversations relating to the US very much dried up around the time that we started to go into our own lockdown,” she said. “We became very insular.”

Australians seemed less concerned about US events such as public rallies demanding restrictions be lifted in areas where COVID-19 was on the rise, such as Michigan. Interest in the US scaled up with the Black Lives Matter rally, but that was later.

Researchers used artificial intelligence and algorithms to identify and categorise tweets which were analysed by human researchers.

They identified 22 public health measures and sorted comments into seven categories: lockdowns, workplace closures, testing and tracing, personal protection, gathering restrictions, travel restrictions and social distancing.

“In order to analyse this huge amount of data, we employed an unsupervised machine learning technique called topic modelling,” Ms Doogan said. “Topic models are algorithms that identify co-occurring words in texts, then group those texts together into collections that represent a ‘topic’.”

The study found that the government’s ability to clearly communicate rules around restrictions, to justify the complexity of the response, and ability to introduce measures without ambiguity or undue enforcement measures would be key to which measures are accepted.

Its finding that people support hard, well explained lockdowns is supported by a new Roy Morgan survey on six of Victoria’s Stage 4 restrictions. It showed large majorities of Victorians supported five of six restrictions there while views were split more evenly on whether Melburnians should be able to visit the homes of immediate family members.