YouTubing at Home: Media Sharing Behavior Change as Proxy for Mobility Around COVID-19 Lockdowns

Compliance with public health measures, such as restrictions on movement and socialization, is paramount in limiting the spread of diseases such as the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (also referred to as COVID19). Although large population datasets, such as phone-based mobility data, may provide some glimpse into such compliance, it is often proprietary, and may not be available for all locales. In this work, we examine the usefulness of video sharing on social media as a proxy of the amount of time Internet users spend at home. In particular, we focus on the number of people sharing YouTube videos on Twitter before and during COVID19 lockdown measures were imposed by 109 countries. We find that the media sharing behavior differs widely between countries, in some having immediate response to the lockdown decrees – mostly by increasing the sharing volume dramatically – while in others having a substantial lag. We confirm that these insights correlate strongly with mobility, as measured using phone data. Finally, we illustrate that both media sharing and mobility behaviors change more drastically around mandated lockdowns, and less so around more lax recommendations. We make the media sharing volume data available to the research community for continued monitoring of behavior change around public health measures.