Retweeting COVID-19 disability issues: Risks,

Transcript:Retweeting COVID-19 disability issues: Risks,:
Retweeting COVID-19 disability issues: Risks, support and outrage Mike Thelwall, Jonathan M. Levitt Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group University of Wolverhampton, UK m.Thelwall@wlv.ac.uk and j.m.levitt@wlv.ac.uk Project goal Identify disability-related Covid-19 themes that resonated on Twitter (many retweets). To serve as a record of core disability issues during Covid-19 and possibly generate new insights. Rationale for RTs - Highly retweeted tweets: Must resonate with the public in some way. May reflect issues considered important by many. Limitations 1 The method has many limitations. Most don’t use Twitter. Funny tweets can get highly retweeted. Two studies Initial study of tweets March 10 to April 4, 2020 Published as “Retweeting Covid-19 disability issues: Risks, support and outrage”. Follow-up study March 10 to November 7, 2020 Reported here for the first time. Methods Used a program (Mozdeh) to collect English tweets matching one of COVID-19, coronavirus, and “corona virus” continually from March 10 (47 million tweets). Identified a subset matching disab, ableism, ableist, or pwd (people with disabilities). Ranked tweets by retweet count. Checked the most highly retweeted to eliminate duplicates and irrelevant tweets. Grouped the top 100 highly retweeted tweets by theme. Results The top 100 retweets account for 437,271 retweets and probably 2 million Likes. All except one were supportive of disability issues. Three were tweets announcing the deaths of people with disabilities. The following slides report the main themes. Untruths to people with disabilities exposed (4 tweets; 142,927 retweets) Things Covid has proven: 1. The job you were told couldn't be done remotely can be done remotely. 2. Many disabled workers could have been working from home, but corporations just didnt want them to. 3. Internet is a utility, not a luxury. 4. Universal healthcare is necessary As a disabled person it hurts to see all the adjustments that we’ve been denied suddenly be made available because non-disabled people might get sick. But we will remember, we see you & your ableism. So next time you deny us accommodations, we will say “but during Coronavirus?” Don’t write off people with disabilities (32 tweets; 115,686 retweets) Folks, when you say "The corona virus isn't a big deal, it only kills the disabled, elderly, chronically-ill, and immunocompromised," the implication is that those people are expendable. Please be more careful. If your college’s covid-19 plan doesn’t center houseless students, first-gen/ low-income students, international students, immunocompromised students, and students with disabilities then it isn’t a recovery