Sociology of Digital COVID-19 Discourse Demonstrates How Local Culture Shapes Online Communication

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need for rapid and effective surveillance tools to detect, monitor, and respond to emerging health threats. Digital epidemiology offers such potential by exploiting social media data to monitor both disease dynamics and public discourse. In this study, we not only measure differences in digital engagement but also explicitly analyze the sociology of online communication, comparing COVID-19-related conversations on Twitter (now X) in Mexico City and Paris over an 18-month period. We document that engagement and content on digital social networks differ profoundly between the study sites, and we interpret these divergences through a sociological and sociopolitical lens. Beyond variations in engagement, emotional tone, sentiment distribution, and hashtag usage, and after normalizing for differences in collection volume, our analysis highlights contrasting affective and political profiles: discourse in Mexico City showed higher per-tweet engagement, a larger share of fear, affiliative and positive content, and was consistent with previously documented coordinated political campaigns, whereas discourse in Paris carried a larger share of anger and of negative sentiment and appeared more fragmented and less centrally orchestrated. By highlighting these divergences, we show that digital epidemiology is inseparable from social sciences, since cultural and political contexts mediate how health information circulates and how populations engage with it. Ultimately, integrating digital technologies with interdisciplinary collaboration can enhance surveillance, provided that local sociological dynamics are explicitly considered in the design of interventions.