With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has rapidly become a crucial communication tool for information generation, dissemination, and consumption.

In this scoping review, were selected and examined peer-reviewed empirical studies relating to COVID-19 and social media during the first outbreak from November, 2019, to November, 2020.

From an analysis of 81 studies, were identified five overarching public health themes concerning the role of online social media platforms and COVID-19.

These themes focused on:

surveying public attitudes,

identifying infodemics,

assessing mental health,

detecting or predicting COVID-19 cases,

analysing government responses to the pandemic and

evaluating quality of health information in prevention education videos.

Furthermore, this Review emphasises the paucity of studies on the application of machine learning on data from COVID-19-related social media and a scarcity of studies documenting real-time surveillance that was developed with data from social media on COVID-19.

For COVID-19, social media can have a crucial role in disseminating health information and tackling infodemics and misinformation.