COVID-19: Social Media Sentiment Analysis on Reopening
This provides insights into public emotional responses to policy changes during a pandemic, but it is incremental as it applies existing sentiment analysis methods to a new topic (reopening) rather than lockdown.
The paper analyzed public sentiment on reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic using Twitter data from the United States, finding that fear decreased as reopening began and overall sentiment became less negative, though daily positive cases rose.
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is the most talked topic in social media platforms in 2020. People are using social media such as Twitter to express their opinion and share information on a number of issues related to the COVID-19 in this stay at home order. In this paper, we investigate the sentiment and emotion of peoples in the United States on the subject of reopening. We choose the social media platform Twitter for our analysis and study the Tweets to discover the sentimental perspective, emotional perspective, and triggering words towards the reopening. During this COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have made some analysis on various social media dataset regarding lockdown and stay at home. However, in our analysis, we are particularly interested to analyse public sentiment on reopening. Our major finding is that when all states resorted to lockdown in March, people showed dominant emotion of fear, but as reopening starts people have less fear. While this may be true, due to this reopening phase daily positive cases are rising compared to the lockdown situation. Overall, people have a less negative sentiment towards the situation of reopening.