Long-term Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Public Sentiments in Mainland China: Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Posts

Abstract

Background The COVID-19 outbreak has induced negative emotions among people. These emotions are expressed by the public on social media and are rapidly spread across the internet, which could cause high levels of panic among the public. Understanding the changes in public sentiment on social media during the pandemic can provide valuable information for developing appropriate policies to reduce the negative impact of the pandemic on the public. Previous studies have consistently shown that the COVID-19 outbreak has had a devastating negative impact on public sentiment. However, it remains unclear whether there has been a variation in the public sentiment during the recovery phase of the pandemic. Objective In this study, we aim to determine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in mainland China by continuously tracking public sentiment on social media throughout 2020. Methods We collected 64,723,242 posts from Sina Weibo, China’s largest social media platform, and conducted a sentiment analysis based on natural language processing to analyze the emotions reflected in these posts. Results We found that the COVID-19 pandemic not only affected public sentiment on social media during the initial outbreak but also induced long-term negative effects even in the recovery period. These long-term negative effects were no longer correlated with the number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases both locally and nationwide during the recovery period, and they were not attributed to the postpandemic economic recession. Conclusions The COVID-19 pandemic induced long-term negative effects on public sentiment in mainland China even as the country recovered from the pandemic. Our study findings remind public health and government administrators of the need to pay attention to public mental health even once the pandemic has concluded.

Appeal of word of mouth: Influences of public opinions and sentiment on ports in corporate choice of import and export trade in the post-COVID-19 era

“…Public opinions exist in every aspect of people's life and affects people's public behavior, which is an important issue that needs to be addressed in social development. As a result of the global epidemic of COVID-19, there have appeared increasingly rich and diverse studies on the analysis of public sentiment through public opinion texts and the analysis of social news ( Monselise et al, 2021 ; Tan et al, 2021 ), generally committed to analyzing more abstract positive, neutral and negative emotional features ( Sakti et al, 2021 ) or emotional manifestations such as discrimination, anger and joy through traditional text analysis or online text analysis to judge whether the public opinion is for or against ( Barachi et al, 2021 ). However, such research is obviously not deep enough to explore the in-depth emotional connotations and the wide perspectivesin public opinions.…”

Sentiment Analysis of Public Social Media as a Tool for Health-Related Topics

“…Twitter is among the most used platforms for data mining [7], [11], [45], [46] due to its accessibility through an official API and a large amount of retrievable data. Other social media platforms, such as Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Gab, and Imgur, or even Chinese platforms, such as WeChat, can also be used for multimedia data scraping [47]- [49] or multisource data analysis purposes [50] that do not necessarily require the platform's consent. Some information related to the public's interest in specific topics over time can be obtained from search engines using tools such as Google Trends.…”

The Prevalence of and Factors Associated With Anxiety and Depression Among Working-Age Adults in Mainland China at the Early Remission Stage of the Coronavirus 2019 Pandemic

“…Second, some important data was not collected, such as related information-seeking variables ( Pan et al, 2020 ). Liu et al (2021) found that respondents who spent considerable time browsing excessive negative information related to the pandemic displayed an increased likelihood of anxiety during the pandemic, and Tan et al (2021) reported that COVID-19 induces long-term negative effects on online public sentiments even as the country recovers from the pandemic. Finally, this study was cross-sectional, and a follow-up study should be implemented to trace the changing pattern of mental health in adult, working-age people in Mainland China given the background of the COVID-19 resurgence induced by the highly infectious Delta variant and other virus variants imported from abroad, as well as in the post-COVID-19 period.…”