Global health, global networks: a multilingual network approach to COVID-19 tweets in Norway, Korea, and Italy

Abstract

Social media have created new opportunities for public health communicators to reach citizens without the filter of the news media. But these platforms also pose the challenge of having to compete with a wider variety of other actors – actors who, in a global pandemic, may be inside or outside the country. This transnational dimension of health communication, while alluded to in the academic literature, is still little understood, raising the need for new methodologies. Using large Twitter datasets from the period of the first pandemic lockdown in Norway, Italy, and South Korea, this paper demonstrates the use of multilingual network data for understanding health communication. The findings suggest that such a methodological approach, which reveals users’ transnational networks, can help identify the larger networks in which users interact and find health information, including global sources of misinformation.