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Global Sentiments Surrounding the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter: Analysis of Twitter Trends
BACKGROUND: With the World Health Organization’s pandemic declaration and government-initiated actions against coronavirus disease (COVID-19), sentiments surrounding COVID-19 have evolved rapidly. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine worldwide trends of four emotions—fear, anger, sadness, and joy—...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
JMIR Publications
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7247466/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32412418 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/19447 |
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author | Lwin, May Oo Lu, Jiahui Sheldenkar, Anita Schulz, Peter Johannes Shin, Wonsun Gupta, Raj Yang, Yinping |
author_facet | Lwin, May Oo Lu, Jiahui Sheldenkar, Anita Schulz, Peter Johannes Shin, Wonsun Gupta, Raj Yang, Yinping |
author_sort | Lwin, May Oo |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: With the World Health Organization’s pandemic declaration and government-initiated actions against coronavirus disease (COVID-19), sentiments surrounding COVID-19 have evolved rapidly. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine worldwide trends of four emotions—fear, anger, sadness, and joy—and the narratives underlying those emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: Over 20 million social media twitter posts made during the early phases of the COVID-19 outbreak from January 28 to April 9, 2020, were collected using “wuhan,” “corona,” “nCov,” and “covid” as search keywords. RESULTS: Public emotions shifted strongly from fear to anger over the course of the pandemic, while sadness and joy also surfaced. Findings from word clouds suggest that fears around shortages of COVID-19 tests and medical supplies became increasingly widespread discussion points. Anger shifted from xenophobia at the beginning of the pandemic to discourse around the stay-at-home notices. Sadness was highlighted by the topics of losing friends and family members, while topics related to joy included words of gratitude and good health. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, global COVID-19 sentiments have shown rapid evolutions within just the span of a few weeks. Findings suggest that emotion-driven collective issues around shared public distress experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic are developing and include large-scale social isolation and the loss of human lives. The steady rise of societal concerns indicated by negative emotions needs to be monitored and controlled by complementing regular crisis communication with strategic public health communication that aims to balance public psychological wellbeing. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7247466 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | JMIR Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-72474662020-06-01 Global Sentiments Surrounding the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter: Analysis of Twitter Trends Lwin, May Oo Lu, Jiahui Sheldenkar, Anita Schulz, Peter Johannes Shin, Wonsun Gupta, Raj Yang, Yinping JMIR Public Health Surveill Original Paper BACKGROUND: With the World Health Organization’s pandemic declaration and government-initiated actions against coronavirus disease (COVID-19), sentiments surrounding COVID-19 have evolved rapidly. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine worldwide trends of four emotions—fear, anger, sadness, and joy—and the narratives underlying those emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: Over 20 million social media twitter posts made during the early phases of the COVID-19 outbreak from January 28 to April 9, 2020, were collected using “wuhan,” “corona,” “nCov,” and “covid” as search keywords. RESULTS: Public emotions shifted strongly from fear to anger over the course of the pandemic, while sadness and joy also surfaced. Findings from word clouds suggest that fears around shortages of COVID-19 tests and medical supplies became increasingly widespread discussion points. Anger shifted from xenophobia at the beginning of the pandemic to discourse around the stay-at-home notices. Sadness was highlighted by the topics of losing friends and family members, while topics related to joy included words of gratitude and good health. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, global COVID-19 sentiments have shown rapid evolutions within just the span of a few weeks. Findings suggest that emotion-driven collective issues around shared public distress experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic are developing and include large-scale social isolation and the loss of human lives. The steady rise of societal concerns indicated by negative emotions needs to be monitored and controlled by complementing regular crisis communication with strategic public health communication that aims to balance public psychological wellbeing. JMIR Publications 2020-05-22 /pmc/articles/PMC7247466/ /pubmed/32412418 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/19447 Text en ©May Oo Lwin, Jiahui Lu, Anita Sheldenkar, Peter Johannes Schulz, Wonsun Shin, Raj Gupta, Yinping Yang. Originally published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (http://publichealth.jmir.org), 22.05.2020. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://publichealth.jmir.org, as well as this copyright and license information must be included. |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Lwin, May Oo Lu, Jiahui Sheldenkar, Anita Schulz, Peter Johannes Shin, Wonsun Gupta, Raj Yang, Yinping Global Sentiments Surrounding the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter: Analysis of Twitter Trends |
title | Global Sentiments Surrounding the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter: Analysis of Twitter Trends |
title_full | Global Sentiments Surrounding the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter: Analysis of Twitter Trends |
title_fullStr | Global Sentiments Surrounding the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter: Analysis of Twitter Trends |
title_full_unstemmed | Global Sentiments Surrounding the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter: Analysis of Twitter Trends |
title_short | Global Sentiments Surrounding the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter: Analysis of Twitter Trends |
title_sort | global sentiments surrounding the covid-19 pandemic on twitter: analysis of twitter trends |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7247466/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32412418 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/19447 |
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