National Leaders’ Usage of Twitter in Response to COVID-19: A Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Twitter is a powerful tool for world leaders to disseminate public health information and to reach citizens. While Twitter, like other platforms, affords world leaders the opportunity to rapidly present information to citizens, the discourse is often politically framed. In this study, we analysed how leaders’ of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing group use Twitter to frame the COVID-19 virus. Specifically, four research questions were explored: 1) How frequently did each leader tweet about COVID-19 in 2020? 2) Which frames emerged from tweet content of each leader regarding COVID-19? 3) What was the overall tweet valence of each leader regarding COVID-19? and 4) To what extent can leaders’ future tweets be predicted by the data? We used natural language processing (NLP) and conducted sentiment analysis via Python to identify frames and to compare the leaders’ messaging. Results showed that of the leaders, President Trump tweeted the most, with Prime Minister Morrison posting the least number of tweets. The majority of each leaders’ tweets were positive, while President Trump had the most negative tweets. Predictive modelling of tweet behavior was highly accurate.

HunEmBERT: A Fine-Tuned BERT-Model for Classifying Sentiment and Emotion in Political Communication

“…Research on the expression of emotions in political communication has been increasingly emphasized in recent years in international and Hungarian social science research [8], [34], [35], [36], [37], [38]. These studies primarily analyze the speeches of politicians in the media and on social media [39], [40], [41]. Analyzing the emotional charge of political and especially parliamentary speeches and their aspects with NLP tools is a novel idea [28], [29], especially in Hungarian.…”

The ways racism emerged in the era of President Donald Trump and its impact on Asian-Americans during COVID-19: A sentiment analysis

“…The National Leaders' Use of Twitter in Response to COVID-19: A Sentiment Analysis was the study conducted by (Wang et al, 2021). The authors of this paper examined how the Five Eyes leaders' use of Twitter to deflect attention from the COVID-19 virus.…”

“…The findings of research conducted by (Wang et al, 2021) three stages were used to classify the sentiment level. First, they established a column containing the results of each tweet's good or bad attitude.…”

“…Figure 8 The number of tweet containing "COVID" and/or "Virus" (Source: (Wang et al, 2021)) Figure 8 displays the number of tweets containing the terms COVID and virus, both of which are specifically related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump used these two phrases 217 times in 2020, more than any other one of the four national leaders.…”

“…During the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter hashtags like #coronavirus, #COVID19, #pandemic, and others exploded as people started debating, talking about, and learning about the COVID-19 reality. Twitter has developed into a potent instrument for world leaders to communicate with their constituents and spread information on public health (Wang et al, 2021). In addition to more conventional media like television, radio, and newspapers, Twitter might be a potent public health instrument for international leaders to rapidly and effectively notify the public about COVID-19.…”