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      Twitter Discussions and Emotions About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Machine Learning Approach

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          Abstract

          Background

          It is important to measure the public response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Twitter is an important data source for infodemiology studies involving public response monitoring.

          Objective

          The objective of this study is to examine COVID-19–related discussions, concerns, and sentiments using tweets posted by Twitter users.

          Methods

          We analyzed 4 million Twitter messages related to the COVID-19 pandemic using a list of 20 hashtags (eg, “coronavirus,” “COVID-19,” “quarantine”) from March 7 to April 21, 2020. We used a machine learning approach, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to identify popular unigrams and bigrams, salient topics and themes, and sentiments in the collected tweets.

          Results

          Popular unigrams included “virus,” “lockdown,” and “quarantine.” Popular bigrams included “COVID-19,” “stay home,” “corona virus,” “social distancing,” and “new cases.” We identified 13 discussion topics and categorized them into 5 different themes: (1) public health measures to slow the spread of COVID-19, (2) social stigma associated with COVID-19, (3) COVID-19 news, cases, and deaths, (4) COVID-19 in the United States, and (5) COVID-19 in the rest of the world. Across all identified topics, the dominant sentiments for the spread of COVID-19 were anticipation that measures can be taken, followed by mixed feelings of trust, anger, and fear related to different topics. The public tweets revealed a significant feeling of fear when people discussed new COVID-19 cases and deaths compared to other topics.

          Conclusions

          This study showed that Twitter data and machine learning approaches can be leveraged for an infodemiology study, enabling research into evolving public discussions and sentiments during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the situation rapidly evolves, several topics are consistently dominant on Twitter, such as confirmed cases and death rates, preventive measures, health authorities and government policies, COVID-19 stigma, and negative psychological reactions (eg, fear). Real-time monitoring and assessment of Twitter discussions and concerns could provide useful data for public health emergency responses and planning. Pandemic-related fear, stigma, and mental health concerns are already evident and may continue to influence public trust when a second wave of COVID-19 occurs or there is a new surge of the current pandemic.

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          Most cited references32

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          Using thematic analysis in psychology

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              The Impact of COVID-19 Epidemic Declaration on Psychological Consequences: A Study on Active Weibo Users

              COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019) has significantly resulted in a large number of psychological consequences. The aim of this study is to explore the impacts of COVID-19 on people’s mental health, to assist policy makers to develop actionable policies, and help clinical practitioners (e.g., social workers, psychiatrists, and psychologists) provide timely services to affected populations. We sample and analyze the Weibo posts from 17,865 active Weibo users using the approach of Online Ecological Recognition (OER) based on several machine-learning predictive models. We calculated word frequency, scores of emotional indicators (e.g., anxiety, depression, indignation, and Oxford happiness) and cognitive indicators (e.g., social risk judgment and life satisfaction) from the collected data. The sentiment analysis and the paired sample t-test were performed to examine the differences in the same group before and after the declaration of COVID-19 on 20 January, 2020. The results showed that negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, depression and indignation) and sensitivity to social risks increased, while the scores of positive emotions (e.g., Oxford happiness) and life satisfaction decreased. People were concerned more about their health and family, while less about leisure and friends. The results contribute to the knowledge gaps of short-term individual changes in psychological conditions after the outbreak. It may provide references for policy makers to plan and fight against COVID-19 effectively by improving stability of popular feelings and urgently prepare clinical practitioners to deliver corresponding therapy foundations for the risk groups and affected people.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                J Med Internet Res
                J Med Internet Res
                JMIR
                Journal of Medical Internet Research
                JMIR Publications (Toronto, Canada )
                1439-4456
                1438-8871
                November 2020
                25 November 2020
                25 November 2020
                : 22
                : 11
                : e20550
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work University of Toronto Toronto, ON Canada
                [2 ] Faculty of Information University of Toronto Toronto, ON Canada
                [3 ] School of Medicine University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA United States
                [4 ] Middleware System Research Group University of Toronto Toronto, ON Canada
                [5 ] CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science Institute of Psychology Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing China
                [6 ] Department of Psychology University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing China
                Author notes
                Corresponding Author: Tingshao Zhu tszhu@ 123456psych.ac.cn
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1668-2531
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8897-754X
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5068-8833
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0609-0401
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7696-3581
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6031-8147
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0020-3812
                Article
                v22i11e20550
                10.2196/20550
                7690968
                33119535
                90ee418a-480a-4c6c-8ec7-a468fec15b95
                ©Jia Xue, Junxiang Chen, Ran Hu, Chen Chen, Chengda Zheng, Yue Su, Tingshao Zhu. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 25.11.2020.

                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 the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.

                History
                : 22 May 2020
                : 10 June 2020
                : 16 June 2020
                : 28 October 2020
                Categories
                Original Paper
                Original Paper

                Medicine
                machine learning,twitter data,covid-19,infodemic,infodemiology,infoveillance,public discussion,public sentiment,twitter,social media,virus

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