Online News Topics on Face Masks in Australia During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction: During the COVID-19 pandemic, online media coverage of preventative strategies proliferated substantially. News media is constantly informing people about changes in public health policy and practices such as mask wearing. Hence, exploring the news media agenda on face mask use is warranted to analyse circulated topics and their trends. 

Aims and objectives: The aim of the thesis is to examine news related to face masks as well as to identify related topics and temporal trends in Australian online news media during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Method: Following data collection from Google news platform, a trend analysis on the mask-related news titles from Australian news publishers was conducted. Then, a latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modelling algorithm was applied along with evaluation matrices (quantitative and qualitative measures). Lastly, topic trends were developed and analysed in the context of mask use during the pandemic. 

Results: A total of 2,345 face-mask-related eligible news titles were collected from 25 January 2020 to 25 January 2021. Mask-related news showed an increasing trend corresponding to increasing COVID-19 cases in Australia. The best-fitted LDA topic model discovered 8 different topics with a coherence score of 0.66 and perplexity measure of -11.29. The major topics were Topic 1 (mask related international affairs), Topic 2 (introducing mask mandate in places such as Victoria and Sydney), and Topic 4 (anti-mask sentiment). Topic trends revealed that Topic 2 was the most frequent topic in January 2021 (77 news titles), corresponding to the mandatory mask wearing policy in Sydney. 

Conclusion and recommendation: This study demonstrated that Australian news media portrayed a wide range of topics related to face masks, including policy recommendations and people’s attitudes about face masks. Harnessing the news media platforms in health communication research is important for implementing effective pandemic responses. Timely, targeted, and transformative public health messages can rapidly spread around the world to facilitate local and global community mobilisation.