Perspectives of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Reddit: Comparative Natural Language Processing Study of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, the disease has had an unprecedented impact worldwide. Social media such as Reddit can serve as a resource for enhancing situational awareness, particularly regarding monitoring public attitudes and behavior during the crisis. Insights gained can then be utilized to better understand public attitudes and behaviors during the COVID-19 crisis, and to support communication and health-promotion messaging. Objective: The aim of this study was to compare public attitudes toward the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic across four predominantly English-speaking countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia) using data derived from the social media platform Reddit. Methods: We utilized a topic modeling natural language processing method (more specifically latent Dirichlet allocation). Topic modeling is a popular unsupervised learning technique that can be used to automatically infer topics (ie, semantically related categories) from a large corpus of text. We derived our data from six country-specific, COVID-19-related subreddits (r/CoronavirusAustralia, r/CoronavirusDownunder, r/CoronavirusCanada, r/CanadaCoronavirus, r/CoronavirusUK, and r/coronavirusus). We used topic modeling methods to investigate and compare topics of concern for each country. Results: Our consolidated Reddit data set consisted of 84,229 initiating posts and 1,094,853 associated comments collected between February and November 2020 for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The volume of posting in COVID-19-related subreddits declined consistently across all four countries during the study period (February 2020 to November 2020). During lockdown events, the volume of posts peaked. The UK and Australian subreddits contained much more evidence-based policy discussion than the US or Canadian subreddits. Conclusions: This study provides evidence to support the contention that there are key differences between salient topics discussed across the four countries on the Reddit platform. Further, our approach indicates that Reddit data have the potential to provide insights not readily apparent in survey-based approaches.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".