The Australian Twittersphere is a database of tweets from identified Australian accounts, originally set up through the TrISMA project, and now managed by the QUT Digital Observatory. This dataset includes 3.7 million Australian Twitter accounts, with 1.8 billion tweets captured to date. Since the beginning of 2019, there have been about 800,000 new tweets per day, from 100,000 daily active users. The 100 days of COVID-19 in the Australian Twittersphere dataset consists of 2.8 million tweet IDs corresponding to tweets from the Australian Twittersphere that mention the COVID-19 pandemic, either through Coronavirus specific hashtags or keywords. The tweets were created on or after 20 January 2020, and up until 23 May 2020 (the 15 weeks that form the first ‘100 days’ of COVID-19 in Australia). This dataset provides a glimpse of the experiences and attitudes of Australians presently living through this global pandemic. We are all in this together and as such this dataset has been released as rapidly as possible to enable use by the broader research community.

The SQL used to extract the tweets from the Australian Twittersphere database is as follows:

SELECT tweet_id
FROM oz_twitter.tweet
WHERE created_at >= '2020-01-19 14:00:00' -- corresponds to >= '2020-01-20 00:00:00' in Brisbane time
AND created_at < '2020-05-03 14:00:00' -- corresponds to < '2020-05-04 00:00:00' in Brisbane time
AND multiMatchAny(lower(text), ['covid', 'corona', 'flattenthecurve', 'socialdistancing', 'stayhome', 'lockdown', 'wuhan', 'pandemic'])
AND notEmpty(hashtags) = 1;

Access to the Australian Twittersphere database is managed by the QUT Digital Observatory.