This project is a final project for McGill COMP 598, Fall 2021.
This project aims to understand the current discussions about the COVID-19 pandemic in Twitter.
Topics of study:
- The salient topics discussed around COVID and what each topic primarily concerns
- Relative engagement with those topics
- How positive/negative the response to the pandemic/vaccination has been.
- Policies and health/sanitary measures
- Daily life impact
- Social-economical impact
- Scientific breakthroughs and discorveries
- Pandemic severity
- Vaccination-related
Since the start of the pandemic almost 2 years ago, COVID-19 has been consistently under the spotlight by world leaders, major news source, and ultimately the general population. Several tools serve as a way of communicating any COVID-related information, with the most easily accessible and widely used being social media. Therefore, it is of great interest to analyze social media platforms to determine the current discussion space of COVID on social media, which is precisely what we have performed in this study. More specifically, we fetched 1000 COVID-related tweets using the Twitter API, developed the most salient topics based on these tweets, computed the relative engagement for each topic, and determined the overall sentiment to the pandemic/vaccination. The developed topics were Policies and Health/Sanitary Measures, Daily Life Impact, Economic and Social Impacts, Breakthroughs, Pandemic Severity, and Vaccination. We found that engagement tends to involve personal matters, notably for the most common topics, which are Policies and Health/Sanitary Measures, Daily Life Impact, and Vaccination. More importantly, the overall response towards the pandemic and vaccination is more negative than positive.