Retweeting my feelings? Exploring the temporal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on social media use

Social media platform (SMP) use has intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. New user groups are utilising SMPs more frequently to satisfy their unmet psychological needs. However, research to date has insufficiently explored variations in SMP use due to the pandemic. As the pandemic has adversely impacted the general public’s mental health, we propose and then apply the Temporal-Needs-Affordances-Features (T-NAF) model in this context. Public engagement with two international mental health awareness campaigns on Twitter were tracked over four years. Results show that the pandemic initially coincided with a significant increase in engagement (e.g., retweets) and a significant decrease in network size (e.g., followers). This establishes that a larger proportion of individuals engaged with resharing behaviour as the pandemic commenced, reinforcing the importance of SMPs in relation to mental health and needs satisfaction. This study also highlights the importance of temporality in social media research. Future research pathways are discussed

NeedFull – a Tweet Analysis Platform to Study Human Needs During the COVID-19 Pandemic in New York State

Governments and municipalities need to understand their citizens' psychological needs in critical times and dangerous situations. COVID-19 brings lots of challenges to deal with. We propose NeedFull, an interactive and scalable tweet analysis platform, to help governments and municipalities to understand residents' real psychological needs during those periods. The platform mainly consists of four parts: data collection module, data storage module, data analysis module and data visualization module. The four parts interact with each other and provide users with a thorough human needs analysis based on their queries. We employed the proposed platform to investigate the reaction of people in New York State to the ongoing worldwide COVID-19 pandemic