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. 2020 Dec 3;22(12):e21499.
doi: 10.2196/21499.

The Twitter Social Mobility Index: Measuring Social Distancing Practices With Geolocated Tweets

Paiheng Xu  1 , Mark Dredze  1 , David A Broniatowski  2
Affiliations

The Twitter Social Mobility Index: Measuring Social Distancing Practices With Geolocated Tweets

Paiheng Xu et al. J Med Internet Res. .

Abstract

Background: Social distancing is an important component of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Minimizing social interactions and travel reduces the rate at which the infection spreads and "flattens the curve" so that the medical system is better equipped to treat infected individuals. However, it remains unclear how the public will respond to these policies as the pandemic continues.

Objective: The aim of this study is to present the Twitter Social Mobility Index, a measure of social distancing and travel derived from Twitter data. We used public geolocated Twitter data to measure how much users travel in a given week.

Methods: We collected 469,669,925 tweets geotagged in the United States from January 1, 2019, to April 27, 2020. We analyzed the aggregated mobility variance of a total of 3,768,959 Twitter users at the city and state level from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results: We found a large reduction (61.83%) in travel in the United States after the implementation of social distancing policies. However, the variance by state was high, ranging from 38.54% to 76.80%. The eight states that had not issued statewide social distancing orders as of the start of April ranked poorly in terms of travel reduction: Arkansas (45), Iowa (37), Nebraska (35), North Dakota (22), South Carolina (38), South Dakota (46), Oklahoma (50), Utah (14), and Wyoming (53). We are presenting our findings on the internet and will continue to update our analysis during the pandemic.

Conclusions: We observed larger travel reductions in states that were early adopters of social distancing policies and smaller changes in states without such policies. The results were also consistent with those based on other mobility data to a certain extent. Therefore, geolocated tweets are an effective way to track social distancing practices using a public resource, and this tracking may be useful as part of ongoing pandemic response planning.

Keywords: COVID-19; Twitter; index; mobility; social distancing; social media; surveillance; tracking; travel.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: MD holds equity in Sickweather Inc and has received consulting fees from Bloomberg LP and Good Analytics Inc. These organizations did not have any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the article. All other authors have no conflicts to declare.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Mean social mobility index (kilometers) in United States from January 1, 2019, to April 27, 2020. Weeks with missing data are excluded from the figure.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Box plots showing the user distributions of the mean social mobility index (kilometers) before and after social distancing measure were enacted in the United States.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Pearson correlations between daily COVID-19 infection rates and various factors at the state level.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Pearson correlations between the social mobility index and various factors at the state level.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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