Twitter Based Digital Social Movement Pattern to Fight COVID-19

Abstract

Twitter has become a tool for people to trigger a social change, like what is happening right now during COVID-19 outbreaks. Most people are using social media platforms to express their perspectives. For the first time, this research aimed to analyze the pattern of a social movement that happened during COVID-19 Outbreaks by analyzing the Twitter dataset contains 23,476 tweets worldwide with the #COVID19 hashtag which was obtained from 02 March to 09 April 2020. Social Network Analysis tools are used to understand the pattern of movement. This research concluded that if the Government and Mainstream Media Twitter account triggered the conversation in the social media platform, followed by the activists and celebrities who engage in conversation between their followers, an ordinary person spread the point of view of the Government and Mainstream Media across their conversation network. The COVID-19 hashtag successfully engaged 10 protest clusters, which pushed the people to fight against COVID-19 in their countries, mostly targeting the government-related account. The digital social movement pattern is relatively different from the traditional social movement, even it has the same steps, which emerge, coalesce, bureaucratise, and the movement itself, but it takes place in the Digital Public Sphere without any social or political boundaries. The digital social movement forced the government to implement a better policy to fight the COVID-19 Pandemic, including to close the national border to prevent unnecessary effects of International Migration.

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