Abstract
BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic is severely affecting people worldwide. Currently, an important approach to understand this phenomenon and its impact on the lives of people consists of monitoring social networks and news on the internet.ObjectiveThe purpose of this study is to present a methodology to capture the main subjects and themes under discussion in news media and social media and to apply this methodology to analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil.MethodsThis work proposes a methodology based on topic modeling, namely entity recognition, and sentiment analysis of texts to compare Twitter posts and news, followed by visualization of the evolution and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We focused our analysis on Brazil, an important epicenter of the pandemic; therefore, we faced the challenge of addressing Brazilian Portuguese texts.ResultsIn this work, we collected and analyzed 18,413 articles from news media and 1,597,934 tweets posted by 1,299,084 users in Brazil. The results show that the proposed methodology improved the topic sentiment analysis over time, enabling better monitoring of internet media. Additionally, with this tool, we extracted some interesting insights about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. For instance, we found that Twitter presented similar topic coverage to news media; the main entities were similar, but they differed in theme distribution and entity diversity. Moreover, some aspects represented negative sentiment toward political themes in both media, and a high incidence of mentions of a specific drug denoted high political polarization during the pandemic.ConclusionsThis study identified the main themes under discussion in both news and social media and how their sentiments evolved over time. It is possible to understand the major concerns of the public during the pandemic, and all the obtained information is thus useful for decision-making by authorities.
Highlights
In December 2019, the outbreak of COVID-19 in China was reported [1]
This study identified the main themes under discussion in both news and social media and how their sentiments evolved over time
By comparing all the features extracted from news and social media data sets, we present some perceptions on how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting Brazil
Summary
Due to the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 worldwide, the World Health Organization declared a state of emergency. Recent research has confirmed that during the current pandemic, the number of infected people can double every 7 days, and each patient can spread the virus to 2.2 other people on average [2]. In Latin America, there were 937,974 cases of COVID-19 and 49,139 confirmed deaths up to May 31, 2020 [3]. In this region, Brazil is the country that is most http://publichealth.jmir.org/2021/2/e24585/ XSLFO RenderX. According to the abovementioned report [3], there were 465,166 cases and 27,878 deaths in Brazil. The COVID-19 pandemic is severely affecting people worldwide. An important approach to understand this phenomenon and its impact on the lives of people consists of monitoring social networks and news on the internet
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