Around the world in 60 days: an exploratory study of impact of COVID-19 on online global news sentiment

Abstract

The world is going through an unprecedented crisis due to COVID-19 breakout, and people all over the world are forced to stay indoors for safety. In such a situation, the rise and fall of the number of affected cases or deaths has turned into a constant headline in most news channels. Consequently, there is a lack of positivity in the world-wide news published in different forms of media. Texts based on news articles, movie reviews, tweets, etc. are often analyzed by researchers, and mined for determining opinion or sentiment, using supervised and unsupervised methods. The proposed work takes up the challenge of mining a comprehensive set of online news texts, for determining the prevailing sentiment in the context of the ongoing pandemic, along with a statistical analysis of the relation between actual effect of COVID-19 and online news sentiment. The amount and observed delay of impact of the ground truth situation on online news is determined on a global scale, as well as at country level. The authors conclude that at a global level, the news sentiment has a good amount of dependence on the number of new cases or deaths, while the effect varies for different countries, and is also dependent on regional socio-political factors.