Retweeting Covid-19 disability issues: Risks, support and outrage
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Issue Date
2020-04-15
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The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly uneven impacts on sectors of society. People with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to it and so it is important to understand both the disability perspective and the role of social media. This information may help to reduce the risk from the disease. In response, this article uses thematic analysis to investigate 59 disability-related tweets from March 10 to April 4, 2020 that were retweeted at least 500 times, with a quarter of a million retweets altogether. This approach generates quick insights into widely resonating disability-related issues. The results suggest the value of Twitter for disseminating information about the risk, offers or requests for support, the ability of many people with disabilities to adjust to the changes well, and information about individuals with the disease. In addition, there was outrage at suggestions that the disease was less serious because young people without disabilities were relatively low risk, and that people with disabilities might be denied equal access to medical treatment. As one tweet pointed out, people in less vulnerable categories should not be told on Twitter or elsewhere that the disease is less relevant to them because their actions can impact others through social spreading.Citation
Thelwall, Mike and Levitt, Jonathan M. (2020) Retweeting Covid-19 disability issues: Risks, support and outrage. El profesional de la información, v. 29, n. 2, e290216. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.mar.16Journal
El Profesional de la InformaciónAdditional Links
https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2020.mar.16Type
Journal articleLanguage
enDescription
© 2020 The Authors. Published by El Profesional de la Información. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.mar.16ISSN
1386-6710EISSN
1699-2407ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.3145/epi.2020.mar.16
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/