Bridging Performance of Twitter Users: A Predictor of Subjective Well-Being during the Pandemic

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the perils of misinformation over social media. By amplifying the spreading speed and popularity of trustworthy information, influential social media users have been helping overcome the negative impacts of such flooding misinformation. In this paper, we use the COVID-19 pandemic as a representative global health crisis and and examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these influential users’ subjective well-being (SWB), one of the most important indicators of mental health. We leverage Twitter as a representative social media platform and conduct the analysis with our collection of 37,281,824 tweets spanning almost two years. To identify influential Twitter users, we propose a new measurement called user bridging performance (UBM) to evaluate the speed and wideness gain of information transmission due to their sharing. With our tweet collection, we manage to reveal the more significant mental sufferings of influential users during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to this observation, through comprehensive hierarchical multiple regression analysis, we are the first to discover the strong relationship between individual social users’ subjective well-being and their bridging performance. We proceed to extend bridging performance from individuals to user subgroups. The new measurement allows us to conduct a subgroup analysis according to users’ multilingualism and confirm the bridging role of multilingual users in the COVID-19 information propagation. We also find that multilingual users not only suffer from a much lower SWB in the pandemic, but also experienced a more significant SWB drop.