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ABSTRACT / COVID-19 was first detected in Hubei province of China and has had severe impact on the life in the country since then. We investigate how this epidemic has influenced attention dynamics on the biggest Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo. We focus on the real-time Hot-Search-List (HSL), which provides the ranking of the most popular 50 hashtags based on their search volume index. We show, how the specific events, measures and developments during the epidemic affected the emergence of new hashtags and the ranking on the HSL. A significant increase of COVID-19 related hashtags started to occur on the HSL after January 20, 2020, when the transmission of the disease between humans was announced. Since then such hashtags have occupied roughly 40 percent of the list, however, with different contents. We give an analysis of how the hashtag topics changed during the investigated time span and conclude that we see stronger topical correlations, clustering of hashtags and more active attention in the first period, followed by the two periods with weaker correlations when the attention partly turned to regions outside mainland China. To quantify the attention dynamics we measured the lifetimes of hashtags on the HSL, the rank diversity at given ranks and the attention index which takes into account both the highest rank and the duration of the hashtags. Our observations indicate attention diversification since the COVID-19 outbreak in mainland China, a higher rank diversity at the top 15 ranks on HSL due to the COVID-19 related hashtags and an exponential attention decay shortly after the outbreak.
Keywords: COVID-19, Social Media, Public Attention Dynamics, Ranking