Twitter COVID-19 study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Understanding mental health stigma on Twitter before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
IRAS ID
288118
Contact name
Til Wykes
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College London
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 5 months, 3 days
Research summary
On the social media platform Twitter, people can share their opinions and interact with each other by posting “tweets”, which are short messages of up to 280 letters or characters. We want to find out what type of mental health content shared on social media is stigmatizing and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the number of stigmatising tweets made about various mental health conditions. Mental health service users will rate a variety of tweets made by U.K. based Twitter users during different time points, as "stigmatizing" or "non-stigmatizing. Following this two focus groups will be held via virtual group calls, during which topics relating to mental health, social media and the COVID-19 pandemic will be discussed. We also want to develop a machine learning model that will be able to identify these tweets (participants will not be involved in this part of the research).
In this project, we want to:
1. Find out what type of mental health content shared on Twitter is stigmatizing.
2. To develop a machine learning model that can accurately identify stigmatizing tweets.
3. Assess whether fewer tweets stigmatising mental health conditions during the main U.K. lockdown period (April-May) were made by U.K. based Twitter users.Through this research, we hope to gain information from service users on what type of content on Twitter stigmatizes mental health conditions.
REC name
East Midlands - Derby Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/EM/0274
Date of REC Opinion
25 Nov 2020
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion