Author:

Keywords:

Social Sciences, Psychology, Social, Psychology, SARS-CoV-2, pandemic, COVID-19, Twitter, Belgium, HEALTH CRISIS, Communicable Disease Control, Coronavirus, Coronavirus Infections, Emotions, Europe, Humans, Pandemics, Public Opinion, Social Media, 0806 Information Systems, 1701 Psychology, 1702 Cognitive Sciences, Clinical Psychology, 4609 Information systems, 5201 Applied and developmental psychology, 5205 Social and personality psychology

Abstract:

In this study, a social media analysis is conducted to examine the public discourse about the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic on Twitter. In particular, this study aims to examine (a) how the number of tweets varies as a function of the timeline of the pandemic and associated measures and (b) how the content of these tweets, including displayed emotions, changes. Therefore, 373,908 tweets and retweets from Belgium were collected from February 25, 2020 to the March 30. Time series analysis, network bigrams, topic models, and emotional lexica were deployed for analysis. The results showed that significant events related to the virus correlated with an immediate increase in the number of tweets addressing them. Furthermore, the Belgian Twitter discourse was characterized by positively connoted words, which also refer to European solidarity. These findings do not only stress the relevance of Twitter as a medium for public discourse during lockdowns, but also seem to indicate that the Belgian public supports policy measures that respect solidarity in Europe.