Around the world in 60 days: an exploratory study of impact of COVID-19 on online global news sentiment
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Around the world in 60 days: an exploratory study of impact of COVID‑19 on online global news sentiment Amartya Chakraborty1 · Sunanda Bose1 Received: 9 July 2020 / Accepted: 3 October 2020 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Abstract The world is going through an unprecedented crisis due to COVID-19 breakout, and people all over the world are forced to stay indoors for safety. In such a situation, the rise and fall of the number of affected cases or deaths has turned into a constant headline in most news channels. Consequently, there is a lack of positivity in the world-wide news published in different forms of media. Texts based on news articles, movie reviews, tweets, etc. are often analyzed by researchers, and mined for determining opinion or sentiment, using supervised and unsupervised methods. The proposed work takes up the challenge of mining a comprehensive set of online news texts, for determining the prevailing sentiment in the context of the ongoing pandemic, along with a statistical analysis of the relation between actual effect of COVID-19 and online news sentiment. The amount and observed delay of impact of the ground truth situation on online news is determined on a global scale, as well as at country level. The authors conclude that at a global level, the news sentiment has a good amount of dependence on the number of new cases or deaths, while the effect varies for different countries, and is also dependent on regional socio-political factors. Keywords COVID-19 · News sentiment analysis · Unsupervised opinion mining · News negativity · Correlation · News agenda
Introduction We are in the midst of a global crisis, owing to the outbreak and spread of the COVID-19 virus, and the substantially damaging influence of this viral infection has forced the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare the ongoing situation as * Amartya Chakraborty [email protected] Sunanda Bose [email protected] 1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Computational Social Science
a pandemic. As per the official statement of WHO, “COVID-19 is the infectious disease caused by the most recently discovered coronavirus. This new virus and disease were unknown before the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. COVID-19 is now a pandemic affecting many countries globally” [1]. As a precautionary or preventive response to this declared pandemic, countries all over the world have introduced restrictions on mobility and transportation, referred to as lockdowns. Consequently, citizens are being asked to stay indoors as a measure of safety from the infection. In this age of a multitude of news channels and popular virtual social frameworks aimed at better connectivity, a massive share of the time spent indoors is undoubtedly invested in engaging with such media. This is corroborated by the recent study [2] which has revealed that there has been about 57% increase in news consumption by watching television or on smartphones, du
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