AraHealth: A Dataset for Arabic Health-Related Advice Directed to the General Public on Twitter During the Early Spread of COVID-19 [Dataset]

Health-related advice directed to the general public on Twitter provides insight into the use of social media during health emergencies. This paper describes our data collection, sampling, and analysis of 24 million tweets in Arabic in March and early April 2020. We make reference to a parallel dataset and analysis of tweets in English during the same period. The contribution of this paper is a description of our dataset, our coding process to indiciate tweets with health related advice, and our analysis and comparisons of the characteristics of the tweets with and without health-related advice. These contributions provide the basis for future research on semi-automated classifiers for health-related advice and efforts to reduce the spread of harmful health advice.