#IndiaFightsCorona on Twitter: Tweets around seeking or providing medical help increase by 1958%
#IndiaFightsCorona on Twitter: Tweets around seeking or providing medical help increase by 1958%
Chennai , 30th June 2021 : Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter has played a critical role in ke eping people connected and amplifying authoritative information from credible sources. Especially over the cou rse of this past year, the way people have used Twitter has evolved. With the onset of the second wave of COVI D-19 in India, Twitter emerged as a real-time helpline as people turned to the service seeking and offering help to secure life-saving facilities, medicines, food, and much more. An incredibly positive people’s movement to sup port one another took shape on the service.
Tweets on COVID-19 grew manifold during April 01 – May 31, 2021, and the service witnessed 100% growth in COVID-19 conversations compared with the previous two months (February 01 – March 31).
Medical help: Tweets around seeking or providing medical help inc reased by 1958% (20x). #Covid19 was Tweete d 77%more during the second wave, #Blood was Tweeted 72% more as compared to the Feb-March period, #Pl asma saw an 834% increase and #SOS was Tweeted 152% more during this time. In fact, the exchange of Tweets between people seeking help and those volunteering to co nnect them with resources boosted the volume of re plies – reveal ing a 1.5x increase.
As the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines expanded and vaccination drives gained momentum, people followed and participated in Twitter conversations on vaccine awareness, availability, and much more. Tweets around #V accine and #Vaccination went up by 246%. To support this conversation, Twitter introduced a home Timeline pr ompt that points people to vaccine-related updates and information from authoritative sources.
More than ever, Twitter remains committed to serving the public conversation. It introduced a number of feat ur es and initiatives in support of the COVID-19 conversation in India. Some of these were a dedicated COVID-19 hu b on the Explore page, several Twitter Events Pages that bring together the latest Tweets from a number of authorit ative and trustworthy government organisations, media and civil society sources in local languages, an SOS page, related Topics, Twitter Lists of credible accounts to follow, among several others. The WHO has also engaged with account holders on the service around important issues. Twitter also prioritised the roll-out of Spa ces in India, to give people access to more ways of having informative conversations and staying connected. You can read about these in detail on this blog.
