ANALYZING THE SPREAD OF SITUATIONAL INFORMATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

People utilise social media to get and share different kinds of information at a historic and unprecedented scale during the current coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic. For the public and authorities to respond to the outbreak, only situational information is useful. In order to develop effective information publishing tactics for the COVID-19 pandemic, it is crucial to recognise this kind of situational information and comprehend how it is spread on social media. By using Weibo data and natural language processing methods to categorise COVID-19-related information into seven different forms of situational information, this paper aimed to close this gap. We discovered certain characteristics that helped us anticipate how much of each kind of material will be republished. The findings provide data-driven insights on public interest and information needs