COVID-19 mass media coverage in English and public reactions: a West-East comparison via Facebook posts

Abstract

Newspapers and other mass media outlets are critical in shaping public opinion on a variety of contemporary issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examines how the pandemic is portrayed in the news and how the public reacted differently in the West and East using archival data from Facebook posts about COVID-19 news by English-language mass media between January 2020 and April 2022 (N = 711,646). Specifically, we employed the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (Vader) to measure the news tone on each COVID-19 news item shared on Facebook by mass media outlets. In addition, we calculated a polarity score based on Facebook special reactions (i.e., love, angry, sad, wow, haha, and care) received by each post to measure public reactions toward it. We discovered that people in Western countries reacted significantly more negatively to COVID-19 news than their East counterparts, despite the fact that the news itself, in aggregate, generally contained a relatively similar level of neutral tone in both West and East media. The implications of these distinctions are discussed in greater detail.

Special issue on analysis and mining of social media data

“…Among the published articles, we identify a diverse range of themes which make up the special issue. As many as six articles focus on sentiment analysis for different purposes ( Smetanin, 2022 ; Pratama & Firmansyah, 2022 ; Baxi, Philip & Mago, 2022 ; Nguyen & Gokhale, 2022 ; Shamoi et al., 2022 ; Ali, Irfan & Lashari, 2023 ). Four studies focused on tackling online harms of different kinds, with studies on abusive language detection ( Almerekhi, Kwak & Jansen, 2022 ; Ramponi et al., 2022 ), suicidal ideation detection ( Baghdadi et al., 2022 ) and misinformation detection ( Obeidat et al., 2022 ).…”

“… Pratama & Firmansyah (2022) investigated the engagement of political leaders and health organisations with their audience in social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. To measure the engagement, they focus on the concept of online societal association.…”

Understanding Environmental Posts: Sentiment and Emotion Analysis of Social Media Data

“…Studies like [13] and [14] analyzed public reactions to COVID-19, providing insights into sentiment patterns during the pandemic. A paper conducted by [15] highlights the significance of monitoring public sentiment in social media for decision-making processes and emphasizes the importance of understanding the causes of sentiment spikes, with a focus on extracting relevant topics using the Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) method.…”