Gozzi, N., Tizzani, M., Starnini, M., Ciulla, F., Paolotti, D., Panisson, A., & Perra, N. (2020). Collective response to the media coverage of COVID-19 Pandemic on Reddit and Wikipedia. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.06446. https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/29630/ 

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

- Public attention and opinion are driven primarily by media rather than hard data on the actual spread of the disease, as seen in the rapid decline in public attention to media even as Covid-19 continues to spread
- This decline in public attention in turn leads to the spread of misinformation and lack of interest in more formal sources that provide actual, scientifically-backed information 

Collective response to the media coverage of COVID-19 Pandemic on Reddit and Wikipedia

- Studied 227,768 news reports, 13,448 YouTube videos, 278,456,892 views on Wikipedia pages, and 107,898 submissions and 3,829,309 comments from 417,541 individual Reddit users
- To study Wikipedia articles, the study used the Wikimedia API to collect how many views Wikipedia articles directly related to Covid-19 get (between February 7 and May 15, 2020) in each of the four countries of interest
- Wikipedia articles allows for quantifying people’s responses to the pandemic and see what sorts of pages and topics people are more likely to click on 
- The number of views Wikipedia articles get can also be indicative of the type of information people are most interested in 

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