Abstract
Abstract Since the end of 2019, the COVID-19 outbreak worldwide has not only presented challenges for government agencies in addressing public health emergency, but also tested their capacity in dealing with public opinion on social media and responding to social emergencies. To understand the impact of COVID-19 related tweets posted by the major public health agencies in the United States on public emotion, this paper studied public emotional diffusion in the tweets network, including its process and characteristics, by taking Twitter users of four official public health systems in the United States as an example. We extracted the interactions between tweets in the COVID-19-TweetIds data set and drew the tweets diffusion network. We proposed a method to measure the characteristics of the emotional diffusion network, with which we analyzed the changes of the public emotional intensity and the proportion of emotional polarity, investigated the emotional influence of key nodes and users, and the emotional diffusion of tweets at different tweeting time, tweet topics and the tweet posting agencies. The results show that the emotional polarity of tweets has changed from negative to positive with the improvement of pandemic management measures. The public's emotional polarity on pandemic related topics tends to be negative, and the emotional intensity of management measures such as pandemic medical services turn from positive to negative to the greatest extent, while the emotional intensity of pandemic related knowledge changes the most. The tweets posted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration of the United States have a broad impact on public emotions, and the emotional spread of tweets' polarity eventually forms a very close proportion of opposite emotions.
Highlights
Since the end of 2019, the global outbreak of COVID-19 has caused plenty of political and social issues
The diffusion speed of emotional information is faster and more active in comparison with other types of information [7], which implies that o research on emotional diffusion of the public over COVID-19 related tweets posted by government agencies may shed light on the trend and pattern of opinion changes of the public on the pandemic management r conducted by a government
In this paper we attempt to focus on the public emotion implied in tweets and study the structure, process and characteristics of the diffusion network of emotion between interactive tweets, in an effort to propose an d analytical framework to investigate public emotional diffusion of tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic and verify its effect on opinion analysis of the public about government’s social governance ability of public te health emergencies
Summary
Since the end of 2019, the global outbreak of COVID-19 has caused plenty of political and social issues. Researchers were interested in the emotional analysis of different types of tweets published by government agencies and attempted to investigate the public’s attitudes about pandemic f prevention policies and measures taken by governments [1, 2]. The diffusion speed of emotional information is faster and more active in comparison with other types of information [7], which implies that o research on emotional diffusion of the public over COVID-19 related tweets posted by government agencies may shed light on the trend and pattern of opinion changes of the public on the pandemic management r conducted by a government. C This paper aims to propose a method for characterizing the emotional diffusion network of COVID-19 related tweets posted by US government agencies and measuring its features, which supports dynamic e visualization of emotional diffusion process of tweets.
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