COVID-19 DIPLOMACY ON TWITTER

The research team used a collection service called Octoparse to gather the tweets posted by 20 diplomacy accounts from ten countries: U.S., India, Brazil, Russia, UK, France, Spain, Italy, Turkey, and Germany. Tweets were gathered for the first year of the COVID-19 crisis, ranging from March 2020 to March 2021. Altogether, the 20 accounts published 19,635 diplomatic tweets during the first year of the pandemic. The tweets were then separated by country, and listed according to ID, time, URL, content, language, category, user name, number of retweets, number of likes, user handle, user URL, and location, among other things.
Once the tweets were collected, I designed an algorithm to categorize which tweets mentioned coronavirus word roots, such as “pandemic,” “vac,” and “covid.” This algorithm was also able to determine what tweets were in English.