YouTubing at Home: Media Sharing Behavior Change as Proxy for MobilityAround COVID-19 Lockdowns

TL;DR

This study explores how YouTube video sharing on Twitter can serve as a proxy for mobility changes during COVID-19 lockdowns across 109 countries, revealing diverse behavioral responses and strong correlation with phone mobility data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, publicly available social media-based metric to monitor population mobility and behavior change during pandemic restrictions.

Findings

Media sharing behavior varies widely between countries.

Sharing volume increases dramatically immediately after lockdowns in some countries.

Media sharing correlates strongly with phone-based mobility data.

Abstract

Compliance with public health measures, such as restrictions on movement and socialization, is paramount in limiting the spread of diseases such as the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (also referred to as COVID-19). Although large population datasets, such as phone-based mobility data, may provide some glimpse into such compliance, it is often proprietary, and may not be available for all locales. In this work, we examine the usefulness of video sharing on social media as a proxy of the amount of time Internet users spend at home. In particular, we focus on the number of people sharing YouTube videos on Twitter before and during COVID-19 lockdown measures were imposed by 109 countries. We find that the media sharing behavior differs widely between countries, in some having immediate response to the lockdown decrees - mostly by increasing the sharing volume dramatically - while in others having a substantial lag. We confirm that these insights correlate strongly with mobility, as measured using phone data. Finally, we illustrate that both media sharing and mobility behaviors change more drastically around mandated lockdowns, and less so around more lax recommendations. We make the media sharing volume data available to the research community for continued monitoring of behavior change around public health measures.