Perception of emergent epidemic of COVID-2019 / SARS CoV-2 on the Polish Internet

Andrzej Jarynowski; Monika Wojta-Kempa; Vitaly Belik

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03. 29.20046789 doi: medRxiv preprint To apply Social Network Analysis (Wasserman et al. [33] ) methods to the Twitter data, we build a network with vertices representing Twitter accounts and edges representing retweets (Jarynowski et al. [34] ). The network revealed various connections (social impact, trust, friendship, etc.) between accounts being social actors and the characteristics of the actors (political affiliation, views, etc.). An unsupervised weighted Louvain algorithm (Blondel et al. [35] ) for community analysis was used and the vertex color denotes the community it belongs to. Retweet network [ Fig. 7 ] shows how the discourse is divided into the ruling party (gray), opposition (orange) and the protestant religious and political group / "Idz pod prad" (light blue).