COVID-19: Social Media Sentiment Analysis on Reopening

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter data to understand public sentiment and emotions regarding COVID-19 reopening in the US, revealing decreased fear and negative sentiment during reopening despite rising cases.

Contribution

It provides a focused analysis of social media sentiment specifically related to COVID-19 reopening, which was less explored compared to lockdown discussions.

Findings

Fear was dominant during lockdown in March.

Negative sentiment decreased during reopening.

Positive sentiment increased as reopening progressed.

Abstract

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.