The Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of the Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China.
College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Feb 11;18(4):1756. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18041756.
The Chinese government has launched a digital health code system to detect people potentially exposed to the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) disease and to curb its spread. Citizens are required to show the health code on their smartphones when using public transport. However, many seniors are not allowed to use public transport due to their difficulties in obtaining health codes, leading to widespread debates about these unfair events. Traditionally, public perceptions and attitudes toward such unfair events are investigated using analytical methods based on interviews or questionnaires. This study crawled seven-month messages from Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, and developed a hybrid approach integrating term-frequency-inverse-document-frequency, latent Dirichlet allocation, and sentiment classification. Results indicate that a rumor about the unfair treatment of elderly travelers triggered public concerns. Primary subjects of concern were the status quo of elderly travelers, the provision of transport services, and unfair event descriptions. Following the government's responses, people still had negative attitudes toward transport services, while they became more positive about the status quo of elderly travelers. These findings will guide government authorities to explore new forms of automated social control and to improve transport policies in terms of equity and fairness in future pandemics.
中国政府推出了数字健康码系统，以检测可能接触 2019 年冠状病毒（COVID-19）疾病的人员，并遏制其传播。市民在使用公共交通工具时须在智能手机上出示健康码。然而，由于老年人难以获取健康码，许多老年人被禁止乘坐公共交通工具，导致此类不公平事件引发广泛争议。传统上，人们对这类不公平事件的看法和态度是通过基于访谈或问卷调查的分析方法来研究的。本研究从中国版 Twitter 的新浪微博上爬取了七个月的信息，并开发了一种融合词频-逆文档频率、潜在狄利克雷分配和情感分类的混合方法。结果表明，有关老年人旅行者受到不公平待遇的谣言引发了公众关注。关注的主要对象是老年旅行者的现状、交通服务的提供以及不公平事件的描述。在政府做出回应后，人们对交通服务仍持负面态度，但对老年旅行者的现状变得更加积极。这些发现将指导政府当局在未来的大流行中探索新形式的自动化社会控制，并改进交通政策在公平性和公正性方面的措施。
