COVID-19 on YouTube: A Data-Driven Analysis of Sentiment, Toxicity, and Content Recommendations

TL;DR

This paper analyzes COVID-19 content on YouTube using NLP techniques to assess sentiment, toxicity, and themes, and develops a recommendation system that promotes relevant and responsible pandemic-related videos.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive framework combining sentiment, toxicity, and topic analysis with a tailored recommendation system for COVID-19 YouTube content.

Findings

49.32% positive, 36.63% neutral, 14.05% negative sentiment

0.91% of content identified as toxic

69% coverage with five recommendations

Abstract

This study presents a data-driven analysis of COVID-19 discourse on YouTube, examining the sentiment, toxicity, and thematic patterns of video content published between January 2023 and October 2024. The analysis involved applying advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques: sentiment analysis with VADER, toxicity detection with Detoxify, and topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The sentiment analysis revealed that 49.32% of video descriptions were positive, 36.63% were neutral, and 14.05% were negative, indicating a generally informative and supportive tone in pandemic-related content. Toxicity analysis identified only 0.91% of content as toxic, suggesting minimal exposure to toxic content. Topic modeling revealed two main themes, with 66.74% of the videos covering general health information and pandemic-related impacts and 33.26% focused on news and real-time updates, highlighting the dual informational role of YouTube. A recommendation system was also developed using TF-IDF vectorization and cosine similarity, refined by sentiment, toxicity, and topic filters to ensure relevant and context-aligned video recommendations. This system achieved 69% aggregate coverage, with monthly coverage rates consistently above 85%, demonstrating robust performance and adaptability over time. Evaluation across recommendation sizes showed coverage reaching 69% for five video recommendations and 79% for ten video recommendations per video. In summary, this work presents a framework for understanding COVID-19 discourse on YouTube and a recommendation system that supports user engagement while promoting responsible and relevant content related to COVID-19.