A Characterization of Portuguese Tweets Regarding the Covid-19 Pandemic

• Pedro V. Brum Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Matheus C. Teixeira Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Renato Miranda Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Renato Vimieiro Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Wagner Meira Jr Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Gisele L. Pappa Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/kdmile.2020.11974

Resumo

Twitter has been one of the main sources of information and discussion during the COVID-19 pandemics. This paper characterizes a set of more than 56 million tweets written in Portuguese and collected over a period of 70 days. Our analysis includes the volume of messages, text of tweets, location of tweets, the main elements of tweets (e.g. hashtags and URLs) and the user profiles, including gender. The analyses showed the most discussed topics in the period were quarantine, hydroxychloroquine, agglomeration and social distance, and that the discussions were centered in political issues (e.g., most common hashtags include “fechadocombolsonaro" and “forabolsonaro").

Palavras-chave: coronavirus, Twitter, social media, epidemics, public health, pandemic, covid-19

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