World Wide Web

Engineering

Aerospace engineering

Microblogging

Social psychology

Computer science

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Internet privacy

Situational ethics

Psychology

Social media

Political science

Information overload

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Data science

Information Dissemination

Medicine

Disease

Situation awareness

Publishing

Pathology

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems

During the ongoing outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), people use social media to acquire and exchange various types of information at a historic and unprecedented scale. Only the situational information are valuable for the public and authorities to response to the epidemic. Therefore, it is important to identify such situational information and to understand how it is being propagated on social media, so that appropriate information publishing strategies can be informed for the COVID-19 epidemic. This article sought to fill this gap by harnessing Weibo data and natural language processing techniques to classify the COVID-19-related information into seven types of situational information. We found specific features in predicting the reposted amount of each type of information. The results provide data-driven insights into the information need and public attention.

Characterizing the Propagation of Situational Information in Social Media During COVID-19 Epidemic: A Case Study on Weibo