The Twitter Social Mobility Index: Measuring Social Distancing Practices from Geolocated Tweets

Abstract

Social distancing is an important component of the response to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Minimizing social interactions and travel reduces the rate at which the infection spreads, and "flattens the curve" such that the medical system can better treat infected individuals. However, it remains unclear how the public will respond to these policies. This paper presents the Twitter Social Mobility Index, a measure of social distancing and travel derived from Twitter data. We use public geolocated Twitter data to measure how much a user travels in a given week. We find a large reduction in travel in the United States after the implementation of social distancing policies, with larger reductions in states that were early adopters and smaller changes in states without policies. Our findings are presented on http://socialmobility.covid19dataresources.org and we will continue to update our analysis during the pandemic.

References in corpus (5)

• Selective review of offline change point detection methods
• Geo-located Twitter as the proxy for global mobility patterns
• Understanding Human Mobility from Twitter
• A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Review and Critical Analysis of Privacy-preserving Infection Tracking and Contact Tracing
• Geolocated Social Media Posts are Happier: Understanding the Characteristics of Check-in Posts on Twitter