Will the Relaxation of COVID-19 Control Measures Have an Impact on the Chinese Internet-Using Public? Social Media-Based Topic and Sentiment Analysis

Objective: In December 2022, the Chinese government announced the further optimization of the implementation of the prevention and control measures of COVID-19. We aimed to assess internet-using public expression and sentiment toward COVID-19 in the relaxation of control measures in China. Methods: We used a user-simulation-like web crawler to collect raw data from Sina-Weibo and then processed the raw data, including the removal of punctuation, stop words, and text segmentation. After performing the above processes, we analyzed the data in two aspects. Firstly, we used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to analyze the text data and extract the theme. After that, we used sentiment analysis to reveal the sentiment trend and the geographical spatial sentiment distribution. Results: A total of five topics were extracted according to the LDA model, namely, Complete liberalization, Resource supply, Symptom, Knowledge, and Emotional Outlet. Furthermore, sentiment analysis indicates that while the percentages of positive and negative microblogs fluctuate over time, the overall quantity of positive microblogs exceeds that of negative ones. Meanwhile, the geographical dispersion of public sentiment on internet usage exhibits significant regional variations and is subject to multifarious factors such as economic conditions and demographic characteristics. Conclusion: In the face of the relaxation of COVID-19 control measures, although concerns arise among people, they continue to encourage and support each other.