COVID-19 had and continues to have a great and direct impact on many areas of life and society. These impacts, their effects and methods to deal with them are therefore discussed heavily, with people of very different scientific backgrounds weighing in. One place where this public discussion takes place, and where these different and often contrasting opinions clash, is Twitter. This project aims to identify and analyse how participants of these Twitter debates can be grouped. This is done to create insights into how people act specifically on Twitter when disucssing COVID-19. This includes looking at what networks of users can be observed, how they use the features of Twitter (retweeting, liking, commenting, following, …), and what (scientific) sources and media they promote and cite in their posts.

Seeing as this topic attracted two groups, specific and distinct research questions for each group need to be defined before starting the respective projects. This will be handled in a meeting with the project supervisor, Dr. Wimmer. In this meeting, other questions (dataset, language of tweets, …) should also be discussed.

• Jonas Puchinger (jonas.puchinger@stud.uni-regensburg.de), 4th semester M.Sc. Media Informatics
• Sabine Roth (sabine.roth@stud.uni-regensburg.de), 4th semester M.Sc. Media Informatics
• Theresa Strohmeier (theresa.strohmeier@stud.uni-regensburg.de), 3rd semester M.Sc. Media Informatics

We choose this topic because of its current imapct on society and therefore ourselves. Insights generated by this project could help us deal with the pandemic in a more informed way. Another point of interest was, that this projects presents the opportunity to use interesting research methods (SNA, network graphs, NLP) we never or rarely utilized before and are interested in trying out.