key: cord-0502128-sj535vtc authors: Chang, Ho-Chun Herbert; Pham, Becky; Ferrara, Emilio title: KPop Fandoms drive COVID-19 Public Health Messaging on Social Media date: 2021-10-07 journal: nan DOI: nan sha: b5e81f1f413e1f656adf8c5731ac3cdfaf7eb8aa doc_id: 502128 cord_uid: sj535vtc This report examines an unexpected but significant source of positive public health messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic -- K-pop fandoms. Leveraging more than 7 million tweets related to mask wearing and K-pop between March 2020 and March 2021, we analyzed the online spread of the hashtag #WearAMask amid anti-mask sentiments and public health misinformation. Analyses reveal the South Korean boyband BTS as the most significant driver of health discourse. Tweets from health agencies and prominent figures that mentioned K-pop generate 111 times more of online response compared to tweets that did not. These tweets also elicited a strong responses from South America, Southeast Asia, and rural States -- areas often neglected in Twitter-based messaging by mainstream social media campaigns. Our results suggest that public health institutions may leverage pre-existing audience markets to synergistically diffuse and target under-served communities both domestically and globally, especially during health crises such as COVID-19. On August 21, 2020, the president of the WHO Dr. Tedros Adhanon tweeted an unprecendented message when it concerned public health communication. "Thank you," he wrote, "#BTS for the uplifting #BTS Dynamite and for reminding the #BTSARMY and the rest of us to #WearA-Mask and take care of our health and well-being during this #COVID19 pandemic." The world's most popular boyband had just released their newest single "Dynamite", and in their announcement, directly supported mask-wearing as a public health practice. Our data shows that within a week, Dr. Tedros' tweet grew to become the most shared tweet related to public health practices. The tweet has since received 91.2k likes and 36.9k reweets 1 . In times of public health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, effective messaging of public health practices is essential to combating diseases. Typically, institutional leaders are responsible for ensuring best practices are being communicated. However, the spread of these practices has faced major challenges from misinformation (1) . In the case of mask wearing, anti-maskers emerged in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic has reportedly prevented effective adoption of mask wearing in the US (2) . Evidence shows that countries that adopted the practice earlier generated much better prevention outcomes (3, 4) . Alarmingly, misinformation in many ways disproportionally impacting the Global South. Even before COVID-19, reports had documented how misinformation causes more harm in aggregation, such as misinformation on WhatsApp leading to mob killings in India (5) . Another case-in-point, Brazil's public health had been severely impacted by its president supporting claims of hydrochloroquine as a miracle cure if vaporized. At this time, Brazil is amongst the highest countries in false claims (third to the USA and India), and growing more precarious as their strands of misinformation were decoupled from other countries (6) . From the individual level, misinformation can be stymied by increased deliberation (7), reliance on reason over emotion (8) , and simply thinking about accuracy before resharing (9) . But mechanistically and practically, external factors such as the timing of the information and trustworthiness of the source can impact ones belief in misinformation (10) . Information from third-parties have been found to generate more trust in how Americans received COVID-19-related information. Latkin and associates' study (11) showed that COVID-related data from a university (John Hopkins) received slightly more trust than from state health departments and the CDC, possibly due to the CDC being discredited and politicized by the then President Trump. In other words, the importance of third-parties with no political impetus or alignment but with highly mobilized networks and large online traction like K-pop fandom could be the key for effective and trustworthy dissemination of health information. In parallel, K-pop fandom has been increasingly exerting their powerful influence on social causes internationally. Through their strategic support for artists and enthusiastic online presence, K-pop fans have attracted significant attention from the press recently for their political activism and coordinated collective action, such as their attempt to tank former President Trump's 2020 rally in Oklahoma (12) , and their 2020 successful raising of over one million USD to support Black Lives Matter through the virtual #MatchAMillion campaign (13) . This report studies the effectiveness of mobilizing K-pop fanbase to promote positive health practices on a global scale. Utilizing the largest public Twitter database on COVID-19, we found that the most important player in public health messaging, as related to the most popular health-related hashtag #WearAMask, was the Korean boyband BTS. We show how Twitterbased messaging tends to target populations that are previously harder to reach-such as Indonesia, the Phillippines, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru, as well as more conservative States within the US whose policies had previously neglected mask-wearing. We show that the synergy of public health officials and international idols can be an effective way to not just disseminate critical health messages on a large scale, but also to the most vulnerable populations. A year in review States (included in the Appendix). We use the United States mainly as the country includes the largest amount of Twitter users in the aggregate data set, and would be at the minimum representative of the impact on a single country. Tab. 1) then shows the comparison between the retweet volume of tweets that include BTS and those that do not. Here we use the notation Syn(A + B) to denote the synergy of A referencing B in a tweet, formally: where RT specifies the number of retweets and T the number of unique tweets from A. This captures the ratio between the average retweets per tweet, conditional on including K-Pop or not. The first column shows that a total of 16 tweets containing BTS is responsible for 234,601 retweets. Note, since our data stream captures only 1% of all tweets, the expected number of retweets will be closer to 23 million. On the other hand, there were 2,144 tweets during this one-year period that did not feature BTS, which amounted to 282,650 retweets. We then take the ratio of retweets per post, between those that contain K-Pop and those that don't, which yields an increased virality factor of 111.22. While certainly this is contingent on specific eventssuch as the release of an album-there is sufficient evidence here that demonstrates the use of entertainment platforms can boost public awareness of health practices. Figure 2: Figure 2 shows the normalized population size of 14 countries (the union of the top 10 for both categories). We have shown BTS has increased the virality dramatically; next, we investigate if there is any localization of BTS tweets. Fig. 2 These advantages may be a result of Twitter being the underlying platform. When we adjust for the advantage of K-Pop over Twitter (ADV T ), we observe that the advantage of DC disappears. The efficacy of public health messaging is vital to responding agilely to health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this report, we investigated the key drivers of the spread and distribution of mask wearing messaging on Twitter, and if there are any asymmetries in the target audience. Our results revealed the rising phenomenon where BTS, a South Korean pop group, became the critical factor for global public health messaging on Twitter. Furthermore, while increased virality is to be expected when influential individuals such as K-pop artists and major Western-based health institutions collaborate, we found the amount of synergy to appear underrated. Importantly, the observed virality in our study does not originate from direct messages from the entertainment groups, but from the community of fans and their grassroots response that suggests potentially significant and tangible results. Although we do not have data on how the K-pop fans in our sample practiced mask-wearing in real life, BTS fandom had previously materialized their online participation from the virtual #MatchAMillion campaign to fund rais-ing of over one million USD for Black Lives Matter (13) . This high-profile demonstration could serve as a benchmark for researchers to gauge and study the possible translation between online collective action and offline results. Perhaps more important than the virality aspect is the noteworthy potential for targeted messaging. We show that messages including K-pop elicited heavy responses from countries in Southeast Asia and South/Central America, as compared to messages that did not. Within the US, we found increased K-pop-related responses in densely metropolitan States that are highly susceptible to disease transmission, and rural states that are often neglected (probably unintentionally) by mainstream social media campaigns and news. In simple terms, the inclusion of K-pop not only increased the depth of diffusion, but also toward more diverse and traditionally under-served areas both globally and domestically. With prior studies showing the importance of perceived more neutral third parties in establishing source trusthworthiness (11) , the use and perhaps social responsibility of the entertainment industry in spreading public health practices may be critical to responding to future public health crises. Internationally recognized entertainment artists, as evidenced by their role in the COVID-19 pandemic, contain significant broadcasting power due to tightly tuned audiences despite their differences in ethnicity, national identity, political alignment, and beliefs in health practices such as mask-wearing. This area of synergistic communication remains an open field of study, and future research entails studying the community dynamics more granularly. Handbook of Computational Social Science The Lancet As mob lynchings fueled by whatsapp sweep india, authorities struggle to combat fake information on the messaging platform Cognitive research: principles and implications The New York Times Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2021) Tweets containing the hashtag #WearAMask Tweets from and retweets of important health institutions or figures. These include Dr Tedros, the WHO, the CDC, and the Twitter accounts of all state-level office for the study of our US-Centric portion We first subset a list of these hashtags (such as #BTS and #BTSArmy), then extracted the top co-occuring words related to these groups Given that the entire dataset captures the general COVID-19 related discourse, each of these data subsets intersect with discussion about the pandemic We culled our data from the largest Public COVID-19 Twitter dataset (1) . Our data contains the following sub-datasets: