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Title: | Online public opinion during the first epidemic wave of COVID-19 in China based on Weibo data | Authors: | Shi, WZ Zeng, F Zhang, A Tong, C Shen, XQ Liu, Z Shi, ZC |
Issue Date: | 2022 | Source: | Humanities & social sciences communications, 2022, v. 9, 159 | Abstract: | As COVID-19 spread around the world, epidemic prevention and control policies have been adopted by many countries. This process has prompted online social platforms to become important channels to enable people to socialize and exchange information. The massive use of social media data mining techniques, to analyze the development online of public opinion during the epidemic, is of great significance in relation to the management of public opinion. This paper presents a study that aims to analyze the developmental course of online public opinion in terms of fine-grained emotions presented during the COVID-19 epidemic in China. It is based on more than 45 million Weibo posts during the period from December 1, 2019 to April 30, 2020. A text emotion extraction method based on a dictionary of emotional ontology has been developed. The results show, for example, that a high emotional effect is observed during holidays, such as New Year. As revealed by Internet users, the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic and its rapid spread, over a comparatively short period of time, triggered a sharp rise in the emotion “fear”. This phenomenon was noted especially in Wuhan and the immediate surrounding areas. Over the initial 2 months, although this “fear” gradually declined, it remained significantly higher than the more common level of uncertainty that existed during the epidemic’s initial developmental era. Simultaneously, in the main city clusters, the response to the COVID-19 epidemic in central cities, was stronger than that in neighboring cities, in terms of the above emotion. The topics of Weibo posts, the corresponding emotions, and the analysis conclusions can provide auxiliary reference materials for the monitoring of network public opinion under similar major public events. | Publisher: | Nature Publishing Group | Journal: | Humanities & social sciences communications | EISSN: | 2662-9992 | DOI: | 10.1057/s41599-022-01181-w | Rights: | Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2022 The following publication Shi, Wz., Zeng, F., Zhang, A. et al. Online public opinion during the first epidemic wave of COVID-19 in China based on Weibo data. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9, 159 (2022) is available at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01181-w. |
Appears in Collections: | Journal/Magazine Article |
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