The World Health Organization started the Wear A Mask campaign on social media three years ago as a part of the public health messaging in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Nevertheless, despite the advantages for public health, mask use swiftly turned into a very politicized and contentious subject on a global scale.
On August 21, 2020, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus thanked the South Korean K-pop group BTS for supporting the mask-wearing public health practice in conjunction with the release of their new single, Dynamite. This helped the campaign gain significant traction.
Tedros’ tweet became the most popular mask-wearing tweet after being retweeted by K-pop fans from all over the world and across various beliefs.
According to a new Dartmouth-led study, when health professionals and organizations like Tedros incorporated entertainment groups like “#BTS” into their public health messages on COVID-19, this resulted in 111 times greater virality or retweets.
Online Social Networks and Media publish the findings.
“With the COVID-19 pandemic, government health agencies often became targets of partisan politics that challenged public health messages,” says lead author Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, an assistant professor of quantitative social science at Dartmouth. “If government officials and opinion leaders can leverage entertainers who are perceived as neutral third-parties, this creates a powerful driving force for getting a public message out.”
“Through our study, we wanted to determine if social media still has the power to serve as a democratizing force as it did in 2010,” says Chang.
During the Arab revolutions of 2010 and 2011, when pro-democracy protesters used social media to speak out against the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, social media was seen in this way.
“But after Brexit in 2016, when the United Kingdom officially voted to leave the European Union and the Cambridge Analytica data breach in 2018, people became quite pessimistic towards social media and its lightning speed spread of misinformation as studies reported on how social media can undermine democracy,” says Chang.
The researchers concentrated on one straightforward question: Which social media user had the most influence over public health behaviors, notably mask use?
The researchers examined 7 million tweets about mask-wearing using the largest and most complete public COVID-19 dataset on Twitter. From a dataset of 3.5 billion tweets, the researchers used natural language processing to extract the tweets. Next, they performed a social network analysis to determine how the tweets circulate within the social network. The two other most well-known K-pop groups on Twitter, BlackPink and Twice, as well as the use of the K-pop-specific hashtags #BTS and #BTSArmy were also examined.
The results demonstrate that the WHO’s communications strategy for COVID-19 public health messaging included exploiting the popularity of BTS.
Nearly 234,600 people retweeted the 16 distinct tweets from health officials that contained BTS, the majority of which were tweets from Tedros. In contrast, Tedros’ 2,140 additional tweets that omitted the BTS garnered 282,650 retweets. The 16 tweets that included BTS had almost the same impact (84% of the retweet value) as the 2,140 tweets that didn’t mention K-pop. Therefore, tweets referencing BTS had 111 times higher retweets or virality.
Additionally, the team looked into the rates of tweets with and without masks in every country that uses Twitter. This included determining how many tweets are sent in each nation in relation to its population.
Western nations, led by the United States, noticed a significant increase in tweets including K-pop. However, the global south, including Southeast Asia and South America, which as the researchers explain are regions that are typically underserved by Western-based global organizations, saw the greatest increase in virality between retweets with K-pop over those without K-pop, while the West only saw a modest increase. According to the data on retweets, Vietnam experienced a 3,840% increase (38.4 times greater virality), South Korea a 3,190% increase, the Philippines saw a 1,290% increase, Peru saw a 1,080% increase, and Argentina experienced an 845% increase. The United States experienced a 56% increase, while the United Kingdom experienced a 28% increase.
The majority of the heartland states of South Dakota (52%), North Dakota (41%), Mississippi (39%), Missouri (39%), Utah (37%), Louisiana (37%), Wisconsin (36%), and Nebraska (33%), saw the largest percentage increases in virality for tweets about BTS.
The researchers used user timelines and users’ political diets (left, center, and right) to conduct the analysis. As a result, they were able to create a network of users who retweeted other users’ tweets before and after Tedros’ tweet on August 21, 2020, spanning a four-month period.
While left-leaning users predominated on the network, the findings showed that right-leaning users considerably increased their use of the #WearAMask hashtag after BTS’ presence at the UN General Assembly.
The two other most popular sources of mask-wearing messaging, after K-pop, were tweets citing Eric Ding, the head of the COVID Response Task Force at the New England Institute, and Grey’s Anatomy, the American medical show.
The study also included contributions from Becky Pham and Emilio Ferrara of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
