The Role of Twitter During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

At the end of 2019, COVID-19 (Coronavirus 2019) emerged in Wuhan, China, and spread rapidly worldwide The use of virtual social networks, especially Twitter, has increased due to the present condition The purpose of the present systematic literature review is to review the investigations on Twitter's role in the COVID-19 crisis For this purpose, an appropriate search strategy was used to extract the studies conducted in the Web of Science and PubMed databases In the end, 24 articles were reviewed The results indicate that in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the content and tweets posted on Twitter were affected by this crisis, and various people such as the general public, health professionals, and politicians were sharing opinions, emotions, personal experience, and educational content about exposure to COVID-19 on this social media Therefore, the speed of providing information to people has been one of the main advantages of Twitter during the crisis of COVID-19;however, the risk of using invalid information without scientific citation is also one of the most important concerns of using Twitter among people as well as health and governmental organizations Thus, users should evaluate information accuracy more carefully and pay attention to the quality and validity of information before employing or sharing it Governments and professionals can also prevent this disease's contagion even in similar future crises by employing Twitter correctly in the period of crisis and using the useful experience gained from applying social networks in the outbreak of COVID-19 Copyright © 2020 by the author(s) Licensee Prague University of Economics and Business, Czech Republic This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original publication is properly cited, see http://creativecommons org/licenses/by/4 0/ No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms