A Twitter dataset for Monkeypox, May 2022

After struggling with COVID-19 pandemic for two years, the world is finally recovering from this crisis. Nonetheless, an-other virus, Monkeypox, is quickly spreading throughout the world and in non-endemic regions and continents, threaten-ing the world to a new pandemic. Twitter as a popular social media has successfully been used for predicting and control-ling outbreaks. Much research previously has been done for building early warning systems, trend prediction, and misin-formation and fake news detection. Since tweets are not ac-cessible to all researchers, in this work, a publicly available dataset containing 2400202 tweets gathered from May first to December twenty-fifth, 2022 is presented. Twitter devel-opers academic researcher API which returns all the tweets matching a given query was used to gather the dataset. To this end, the full archive search and keywords related to Monkeypox and its equivalents in other languages, i.e. Mon-keypox or monkey pox or viruela dei mono or variole du singe or variola do macoco were used. The retweets were excluded using the negation operator, and the tweet ids and user ids were extracted and shared with public. Ap-proximately, 1.79 percent (43047 number) of tweets were geotagged. To visualize the geotagged tweets, the longitude and latitude of the bounding box coordinates were averaged. This work will help researchers shed light on the news, pat-terns, and on-going discussions of Monkeypox on social me-dia, identify hotspots, and help contain the Monkeypox virus.

Automated summary

After the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is recovering, but a new virus called Monkeypox is spreading globally, posing a threat of a new pandemic. Twitter has been used successfully for predicting and controlling outbreaks, and this study provides a publicly available dataset of 2,400,202 tweets from May to December 2022. The dataset will help researchers understand the news, patterns, and ongoing discussions of Monkeypox on social media, identify hotspots, and contain the virus.