The Burden of Being a Bridge: Analysing Subjective Well-Being of Twitter Users during the COVID-19 Pandemic

TL;DR

This study investigates how influential Twitter users' subjective well-being changed during COVID-19 and how it relates to their role in spreading information, revealing increased mental suffering and a strong link between well-being and diffusion performance.

Contribution

It introduces a new measurement of bridging performance and demonstrates a significant relationship between users' subjective well-being and their information diffusion role during the pandemic.

Findings

Influential users experienced greater mental suffering during COVID-19.

A strong relationship exists between subjective well-being and bridging performance.

Deep learning models effectively quantify users' well-being from textual posts.

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic triggers infodemic over online social media, which significantly impacts public health around the world, both physically and psychologically. In this paper, we study the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of influential social media users, whose sharing behaviours significantly promote the diffusion of COVID-19 related information. Specifically, we focus on subjective well-being (SWB), and analyse whether SWB changes have a relationship with their bridging performance in information diffusion, which measures the speed and wideness gain of information transmission due to their sharing. We accurately capture users' bridging performance by proposing a new measurement. Benefiting from deep-learning natural language processing models, we quantify social media users' SWB from their textual posts. With the data collected from Twitter for almost two years, we reveal the greater mental suffering of influential users during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through comprehensive hierarchical multiple regression analysis, we are the first to discover the strong {relationship} between social users' SWB and their bridging performance.