Social distancing Tweets may help encourage people to stay home

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-03-04 06:00

International

What does this mean?

Jump to: MultimediaAttachmentsExpert Reaction

French researchers say higher volumes of tweets about social distancing in US states may be linked to more people staying at home the following day. They searched tweets by looking for COVID-19- related keywords, and used geotagging to determine where the tweeters were. Then they compared tweeting with people's movements in the state the next day. They say that for each additional tweet encouraging distancing per 100,000 population, time spent at home increased by 0.3 per cent. In addition, they found more than 99 per cent of the tweets containing social distancing keywords were encouraging distancing, with less than 1 per cent protesting against such measures.