Researchers from the Collegium Civitas Institute of Sociology in Warsaw, under the direction of Dr Marek Troszyński, are analyzing the discourse about coronavirus in Polish social media. The aim of the study is to map the topic of posts in those media that relate to a pandemic as a collective experience.

-We treat entries in social media as created by Internet users, but we do not focus our attention on authors, who are mainly anonymous. The collected texts are elements of public discourse, and thus affect the potential reader, impose the importance of individual thematic areas. They map the collective mentality, along with its main topics, images and affects – said Dr. Marek Troszyński, director of the Digital Civilization Observatory of the Collegium Civitas.

For the needs of the project, scientists collected texts from Polish-language Facebook, Twitter and comments on portals containing the key words: coronavirus or covid. The analysis will cover entries from March 1, 2020 to April 30, 2020. A total of 11,674,944 entries of various length, treated as separate messages, were collected.