Celebrities used social media to influence COVID-19 perceptions

Entertainers, athletes, politicians, and newscaster likely shaped public reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic by using Twitter to share their own risk perceptions, ideologies, and techniques to protect their own health.

The results were part of a new study that examined patterns in a pool of 13 million tweets by people in the public eye (PIPE) from Jan. 1, 2020, to March 1, 2022. Based on those, “findings suggestthe presence of consistent patterns of emotional content shared by PIPE for the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced public opinion and largely stimulated online public discourse,” said the report published in BMJ Health & Care Informatics,...