Analyzing the Chinese public attention to the COVID-19 pandemic using Sina Weibo, a microblogging website
Abstract
The outbreak of COVID-19 in China captured the attention of the whole country. People used social media to search for information about the pandemic and to publish their own thoughts. To explore people’s knowledge and feelings about COVID-19, this study used Python to crawl popular microblogs with the keyword ‘new coronavirus pneumonia’ between 21 January 2020 and 18 March 2020 and analyzed the sentiment tendency using ROST CM6 on the popular microblogging platform, Sina Weibo. The study used Python to capture a total of 34,585 popular microblogs over 58 days, including usernames, number of comments, number of retweets, and contents. The results showed the following: 1) The public consistently paid close attention to the COVID-19 pandemic; 2) Throughout the pandemic, high-frequency words at different stages have partially changed; 3) People generally held a negative view of the pandemic, although performance tended toward a positive change; 4) The number of highly interactive microblogs released by the media is much higher than those of other bloggers, and the total number of reposts and comments on highly interactive microblogs released by the official media was much higher than that of ordinary media. The results of our study demonstrate that the media, especially the official media, played a vital role in broadcasting pandemic information, while the government microblog (which is also the official source of information) played a minimal role. Therefore, further research should focus on persuading government microblogs to communicate more effectively during a pandemic.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Shuai Teng, Jinping Xu, Xiaodong Sun, Fangxin Yu, Yuting Hao
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