Zou Canruo, Wang Xueting, Xie Zidian, Li Dongmei
medRxiv. 2020 Jul 28:2020.07.25.20162024. doi: 10.1101/2020.07.25.20162024.
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread globally since December 2019. Twitter is a popular social media platform with active discussions about the COVID-19 pandemic. The public reactions on Twitter about the COVID-19 pandemic in different countries have not been studied. This study aims to compare the public reactions towards the COVID-19 pandemic between the United Kingdom and the United States from March 6, 2020 to April 2, 2020.
The numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom and the United States were obtained from the 1Point3Acres website. Twitter data were collected using COVID-19 related keywords from March 6, 2020 to April 2, 2020.
Temporal analyses were performed on COVID-19 related Twitter posts (tweets) during the study period to show daily trends and hourly trends. The sentiment scores of the tweets on COVID-19 were analyzed and associated with the policy announcements and the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Topic modeling was conducted to identify related topics discussed with COVID-19 in the United Kingdom and the United States.
The number of daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom was significantly lower than that in the United States during our study period. There were 3,556,442 COVID-19 tweets in the United Kingdom and 16,280,065 tweets in the United States during the study period. The number of COVID-19 tweets per 10,000 Twitter users in the United Kingdom was lower than that in the United States. The sentiment scores of COVID-19 tweets in the United Kingdom were less negative than those in the United States. The topics discussed in COVID-19 tweets in the United Kingdom were mostly about the gratitude to government and health workers, while the topics in the United States were mostly about the global COVID-19 pandemic situation.
Our study showed correlations between the public reactions towards the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter and the confirmed COVID-19 cases as well as the policies related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom and the United States.
自2019年12月以来，2019冠状病毒病（COVID-19）已在全球范围内传播。推特是一个热门社交媒体平台，人们围绕COVID-19大流行展开了积极讨论。尚未对不同国家推特上公众对COVID-19大流行的反应进行研究。本研究旨在比较2020年3月6日至2020年4月2日期间英国和美国公众对COVID-19大流行的反应。
英国和美国的COVID-19确诊病例数来自一亩三分地网站。使用与COVID-19相关的关键词收集了2020年3月6日至2020年4月2日期间的推特数据。
对研究期间与COVID-19相关的推特帖子（推文）进行时间分析，以显示每日趋势和每小时趋势。分析了关于COVID-19的推文的情感得分，并将其与政策公告和COVID-19确诊病例数相关联。进行主题建模以识别在英国和美国与COVID-19讨论的相关主题。
在我们的研究期间，英国每日新增COVID-19确诊病例数明显低于美国。研究期间，英国有3556442条关于COVID-19的推文，美国有16280065条推文。英国每10000名推特用户中关于COVID-19的推文数量低于美国。英国关于COVID-19的推文的情感得分比美国的负面程度要低。英国关于COVID-19的推文中讨论的主题大多是对政府和医护人员的感激之情，而美国的主题大多是关于全球COVID-19大流行情况。
我们的研究显示了英国和美国推特上公众对COVID-19大流行的反应与COVID-19确诊病例以及与COVID-19大流行相关政策之间的相关性。
