Understanding public perception of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) social distancing on Twitter.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Social distancing policies are key in curtailing severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spread, but their effectiveness is heavily contingent on public understanding and collective adherence. We studied public perception of social distancing through organic, large-scale discussion on Twitter.

Design

Retrospective cross-sectional study.

Methods

Between March 27 and April 10, 2020, we retrieved English-only tweets matching two trending social distancing hashtags, #socialdistancing and #stayathome. We analyzed the tweets using natural language processing and machine-learning models, and we conducted a sentiment analysis to identify emotions and polarity. We evaluated the subjectivity of tweets and estimated the frequency of discussion of soci

SUBMITTER: Saleh SN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7450231 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature