Twitter Engagement of U.S. Psychiatry Residency Programs with Black Lives Matter and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Social media have become popular platforms to disseminate information, especially related to politicized topics such as BLM and COVID-19. To better understand how medical institutions have engaged with the social media discourse on BLM and COVID-19, we examined psychiatry residency programs’ tweets in response to George Floyd’s murder and during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. Only 14% of the 249 evaluated psychiatry residency programs had Twitter accounts (we included programs with their own account or their affiliated psychiatry department account) indicating a substantial absence on social media. Of those programs, 78% tweeted at least once about COVID-19 (1,153 tweets) and 56% tweeted at least once about the BLM movement (117 tweets). The top three purposes of tweets were sharing media, posting about an event, and sharing a resource.