Analysis on Twitter of the Actors and Rumors around the Ebola Epidemic 2018-2019 in the Democratic Republic of Congo

The last major Ebola outbreak took place in 2014-2015. This epidemic affected mainly three West African countries (Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia) and killed 20,000 people. A number of articles have studied the rumors that circulated during this outbreak on twitter. (Jin et al. 2014; Fung et al. 2016). Ebola disease still rages today in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1 August 2018. It made more than 2,050 deaths. It's the second-worst epidemic in its history after West Africa. No studies have been conducted to determine who is communicating around this epidemic and what types of tweets / rumors are being broadcast? To answer this question, we conducted an analysis on Twitter via the Radarly (R) software, over a period from April 1 to July 07, 2019.The keyword Ebola and the #Ebola were used, with a filter on the french language. 17,282 tweets were collected and categorized via the software. The tool also extracted and represented knowledge in a cartographic way. It also helped to identify the dominant themes in the form of clusters. The tone of messages has also been determined. Our work has highlighted several actors communicating around the epidemic: general public, experts, politicians, media... Concerning the general public, it was highlighted that a part of the congolese population plays the role of relay of preventive messages and fights against fakenews. However, an another party thinks that the disease is a plot to destabilize the country and.spreads the rumor. Regarding the experts, they share many tweets to inform the general public. Concerning the politicians, the majority supports the medical teams and shows the example. In conclusion, our study, contrary to the 2014-2015 results, retrieve a congolese population divided in two: a part that admits the disease and adheres to the treatment and an another that considers it as a conspiracy. Our study suffers from bias. We did not take into account other media like Facebook and we limited our study to the French language.