Identification of Public Opinion on COVID-19 in Microblogs

Abstract

The development trend of public opinion on the Internet plays a very important role in social stability. During the outbreak of the Corona Virus Disease 2019(COVID-19), all kinds of information flooded the cyberspace, increasing social instability. Timely understanding of online public opinion is therefore of great use to the government in easing social tensions. In this paper, we try to analyze the characteristics of hot topics on the Internet and give some advices for the government to effectively guide public opinion. The comment texts of the crisis events reported by mainstream Chinese media People’s Daily during the novel coronavirus pneumonia were selected on Microblog first, a total of 40,241 comments. The collected comment texts were subjected to word frequencies statistics, and then the LDA topic model was used to find out hot topics in the comments by the public, which were divided into six topics. The characteristics of six different hot topics are analyzed at last.