Topic Modelling of COVID-19 Health Communication on Social Media: Thematic Dynamics and Platform Differences Across 2020–2022
Keywords:
topic modelling, COVID-19, health communication, social media, LDA, BERTopic, Twitter, FacebookAbstract
This study applies topic modelling techniques to a large-scale corpus of COVID-19 health communication on social media, examining the thematic structure, temporal evolution, and platform-specific characteristics of pandemic-related discourse between 2020 and 2022. As social media emerged as a primary channel for public health communication during the COVID-19 crisis, understanding the dominant themes and their development over time became essential for both health communication research and policy design. The study analyzes a corpus of approximately 2.5 million posts collected from Twitter and Facebook, including content produced by major health authorities such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Health Service (NHS), national health ministries, and highly engaged public accounts. Topic extraction was conducted using both Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and BERTopic to ensure methodological robustness and thematic validation. The analysis identifies twenty-two coherent topics grouped into six overarching thematic clusters: epidemiological information, symptoms and treatment, vaccination, non-pharmaceutical interventions, economic impact, and misinformation and myth-busting. Longitudinal analysis reveals significant shifts in thematic prominence over the course of the pandemic. Epidemiological reporting and outbreak monitoring dominated discourse during 2020, while vaccination-related communication emerged as the most prevalent theme throughout 2021. By 2022, discussions increasingly reflected pandemic fatigue, public adaptation, and long-term societal consequences. Comparative platform analysis demonstrates notable differences in topic distribution, with Twitter emphasizing epidemiological updates, policy announcements, and public health guidance, whereas Facebook contained higher proportions of personal experiences, community discussions, and misinformation-related content. The findings contribute to computational social science, health communication, and digital discourse studies by demonstrating how topic modelling can reveal the evolving communicative landscape of global health crises across social media platforms.
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