Five Years of COVID-19 Discourse on Instagram: A Labeled Instagram Dataset of Over Half a Million Posts for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a large multilingual Instagram dataset of COVID-19 posts, analyzes sentiment trends over five years, and compares language-specific sentiment differences, providing insights into public discourse during the pandemic.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive multilingual COVID-19 Instagram dataset with sentiment labels and analyzes temporal and language-specific sentiment trends, which is novel in social media COVID-19 research.

Findings

Sentiment shifted from positive to neutral over time.

English posts had higher positive sentiment than Hindi.

Distinct sentiment patterns observed across languages.

Abstract

The work presented in this paper makes three scientific contributions with a specific focus on mining and analysis of COVID-19-related posts on Instagram. First, it presents a multilingual dataset of 500,153 Instagram posts about COVID-19 published between January 2020 and September 2024. This dataset, available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/d46p-v480, contains Instagram posts in 161 different languages as well as 535,021 distinct hashtags. After the development of this dataset, multilingual sentiment analysis was performed, which involved classifying each post as positive, negative, or neutral. The results of sentiment analysis are presented as a separate attribute in this dataset. Second, it presents the results of performing sentiment analysis per year from 2020 to 2024. The findings revealed the trends in sentiment related to COVID-19 on Instagram since the beginning of the pandemic. For instance, between 2020 and 2024, the sentiment trends show a notable shift, with positive sentiment decreasing from 38.35% to 28.69%, while neutral sentiment rising from 44.19% to 58.34%. Finally, the paper also presents findings of language-specific sentiment analysis. This analysis highlighted similar and contrasting trends of sentiment across posts published in different languages on Instagram. For instance, out of all English posts, 49.68% were positive, 14.84% were negative, and 35.48% were neutral. In contrast, among Hindi posts, 4.40% were positive, 57.04% were negative, and 38.56% were neutral, reflecting distinct differences in the sentiment distribution between these two languages.