A social media analytics platform visualising the spread of COVID-19 in Italy via exploitation of automatically geotagged tweets

Abstract

Social media play an important role in the daily life of people around the globe and users have emerged as an active part of news distribution as well as production. The threatening pandemic of COVID-19 has been the lead subject in online discussions and posts, resulting to large amounts of related social media data, which can be utilised to reinforce the crisis management in several ways. Towards this direction, we propose a novel framework to collect, analyse, and visualise Twitter posts, which has been tailored to specifically monitor the virus spread in severely affected Italy. We present and evaluate a deep learning localisation technique that geotags posts based on the locations mentioned in their text, a face detection algorithm to estimate the number of people appearing in posted images, and a community detection approach to identify communities of Twitter users. Moreover, we propose further analysis of the collected posts to predict their reliability and to detect trending topics and events. Finally, we demonstrate an online platform that comprises an interactive map to display and filter analysed posts, utilising the outcome of the localisation technique, and a visual analytics dashboard that visualises the results of the topic, community, and event detection methodologies.