Anatomy into the battle of supporting or opposing reopening amid the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter: A temporal and spatial analysis.

ABSTRACT: Reopening amid the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a battle on social media. The supporters perceived that the lockdown policy could damage the economy and exacerbate social inequality. By contrast, the opponents believed it was necessary to contain the spread and ensure a safe environment for recovery. Anatomy into the battle is of importance to address public concerns, beliefs, and values, thereby enabling policymakers to determine the appropriate solutions to implement reopening policy. To this end, we investigated over 1.5 million related Twitter postings from April 17 to May 30, 2020. With the aid of natural language processing (NLP) techniques and machine learning classifiers, we classified each tweet into either a "supporting" or "opposing" class and then investigated the public per

SUBMITTER: Li L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8277023 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature