RT Impact: The world
Tweeting during a global pandemic
METHODS TO CLASSIFY COVID-19 TWITTER DATA
Jetstream enables a self-supervised model to classify COVID-19 tweets in order to provide insights into COVID-19 that have not been investigated.
“Public health surveillance and tracking the virus via social media can be a useful digital tool for contact tracing and preventing the spread of the virus. Large volumes of COVID-19 tweets can quickly be processed in real-time to offer information to researchers.” – Brandon Lwowski, Ph.D. student in the Department of Information Technology, AI concentration, at UTSA, and Jetstream Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program participant
MISINFORMATION ABOUT THE COVID-19 VACCINE
Collecting and analyzing between 600,000 and 700,000 Twitter posts a day, the CoVaxxy dashboard tracks and quantifies credible information and misinformation narratives over time. The hope is to encourage the public to be more vigilant about the information they consume on their daily social media feeds in the fight against COVID-19. Various RT services are deployed to aid in this research, including Jetstream, Slate-Project for storage, and the Carbonate supercomputer.
“With Jetstream, it’s very easy to set up and we can configure the machines how we want them. We found that it’s really useful and powerful because we can essentially set up different machines to do different roles, and we have complete control over the machines ourselves.” – John Bryden, executive director of IU’s Observatory on Social Media