全球傳染病風險下的社交媒體訊息分享：Twitter社群的COVID-19貼文內容與超連結分析

Global Information Sharing on Social Media under the COVID-19 Risk: Analysis of Hyperlinks and Contents on Twitter

新興傳染病的未知與不確定風險為人們帶來焦慮與恐懼，大量資訊在全球社交媒體分享與流傳，造成資訊疫病（infodemic）。本研究目的是探究COVID-19爆發初期，Twitter社群分享的超連結訊息來源與內容類型，收集2020年1月到3月Twitter的相關貼文542萬則，結合運算傳播與質化方法，分析貼文超連結指向哪些網站訊息來源，找出社群最常分享的單一超連結是哪種類型的內容，進而探討這些文本內容形構的意義。
本研究發現Twitter社群最常見的訊息來源為社交媒體平臺、專業新聞網站、內容農場網站，這反映文字與影音內容的跨社交平臺傳播生態，全球或在地專業新聞仍是人們最常仰賴的訊息來源，內容農場網站則作為另類訊息來源。
在COVID-19爆發初期，Twitter社群分享數高的超連結內容有四種主要類型：即時更新的疫情數據、吹哨者李文亮醫生之死的突發新聞、關於病毒起源疑似為生化武器的陰謀論、中國的對外宣傳。前二類是以事實為基礎的正確訊息，幫助公眾瞭解疫情最新進展與吹哨者死於疫病的公眾反應；後二類是社交媒體的運算宣傳，利用疫情期間人們的恐慌與焦慮心理，造就更多陰謀論流傳與中國宣傳的操作空間。

In December 2019 an unidentified type of pneumonia with strong contagiousness broke out in Wuhan, China (originally known as Wuhan pneumonia and later renamed as coronavirus disease 2019, COVID-19). The epidemic rapidly spread to the whole of China and surrounding countries by late January, 2020. The epidemic in China and Asian countries quickly aroused great concern and discussion among the global Chinese and international communities on social media.
The unknown risk of highly contagious emerging diseases has deepened the anxiety and fear of people around the world to varying degrees. People share and spread a lot of information on social media, including news reports, public discussions, and even various false information or conspiracy theories. Emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger, etc. provide opportunities to people with intentions to use fear to manipulate false information. This resulted in an increasing amount of false information and conspiracy theories during the epidemic, harming the control of the epidemic and causing social media users to have information epidemics. This is called‘infodemic’.