A brand new research led by MIT researchers makes an attempt to measure how the pandemic affected public sentiment via an enormous examination of a whole bunch of tens of millions social media posts in about 100 international locations. Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT
Study makes use of social media to measure how a lot sentiment has been affected by the Covid-19 disaster, worldwide.
The Covid-19 pandemic has been miserable, demoralizing, and aggravating for folks all over the world. But is there any approach to measure precisely how unhealthy it has made everybody really feel?
A brand new research led by MIT researchers attempts just that, through a massive examination of hundreds of millions social media posts in about 100 countries. The research, which analyzes the language terms used in social media, finds a pronounced drop in positive public sentiment after the pandemic set in during early 2020 — with a subsequent, incremental, halting return to prepandemic status.
To put that downturn in perspective, consider a prepandemic fact that the same kind of analysis uncovered: Typically, people express the most upbeat emotions on social media on weekends, and the most negative ones on Monday. Worldwide, the onset of the pandemic induced a negative turn in sentiment 4.7 times as large as the traditional weekend-Monday gap. Thus the early pandemic months were like a really, really bad Monday, on aggregate, globally, for social media users.
“The takeaway here is that the pandemic itself caused a huge emotional toll, four to five times the variation in sentiment observed in a normal week,” says Siqi Zheng, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results.
The paper, “Global evidence of expressed sentiment alterations during the Covid-19 pandemic,” was published on March 17, 2022, in Nature Human Behaviour.
The authors are Jianghao Wang, an associate professor at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Science, in Beijing; Yichun Fan, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the Sustainable Urbanization Lab (SUL); Juan Palacios, a postdoc at the MIT Center for Real Estate and SUL; Yuchen Chai, a researcher at DUSP and SUL; Nicolas Guetta-Jeanrenaud, a graduate student in the MIT Technology and Policy Program (TPP); Nick Obradovich, a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in the Center for Humans and Machines; Chenghu Zhou; and Zheng, who is the Samuel Tak Lee Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at MIT and faculty director of the MIT Center for Real Estate and SUL.
To conduct the study, the researchers examined 654 million location-identified social media posts from Twitter in about 100 countries. The posts appeared between Jan. 1, 2020, and May 31, 2020, an early phase of the global pandemic.
The researchers used natural-language processing software to evaluate the content of the social media, and examined the language of pandemic-period posts in relation to historical norms. Having previously studied the effects of pollution, extreme weather, and natural disasters on public sentiment, they found that the pandemic produced bigger changes in mood than those other circumstances.
“The reaction to the pandemic was also three to four times the change in response to extreme temperatures,” Fan observes. “The pandemic shock is even larger than the days when there is a hurricane in a region.”
The biggest drops in sentiment occurred in Australia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Colombia. The countries least affected by the pandemic in these terms were Bahrain, Botswana, Greece, Oman, and Tunisia.
The study also revealed a potentially surprising fact about temporary lockdown policies — namely, that lockdowns did not appear to have much of an effect on the public mood.
“You can’t expect lockdowns to have the same effect on every country, and the distribution of responses is quite wide,” says Fan. “But we found the responses actually largely centered around a very small positive reaction [to lockdowns]. … It’s undoubtedly not the overwhelmingly unfavourable impression on those that may be anticipated.”
As to why folks might need reacted like this, Zheng says, “On the one hand, lockdown policies might make people feel secure, and not as scared. On the other hand, in a lockdown when you cannot have social activities, it’s another emotional stress. The impact of lockdown policies perhaps runs in two directions.”
Because many components may concurrently have an effect on public sentiment throughout a lockdown, the researchers in contrast the temper of nations throughout lockdowns to these with comparable traits that concurrently didn’t enact the identical insurance policies.
The students additionally evaluated patterns of sentiment restoration throughout the early 2020 interval, discovering that some international locations took so long as 29 days to erase half of the dropoff in sentiment they skilled; 18 p.c of nations didn’t recuperate to their prepandemic sentiment degree.
The new paper is a part of the Global Sentiment mission in Zheng’s Sustainable Urbanization Lab, which research public sentiment as expressed via social media, quite than public-opinion polling.
“The traditional approach is to use surveys to measure well-being or happiness,” Zheng observes. “But a survey has smaller sample size and low frequency. This a real-time measure of people’s sentiment.”
Reference: “Global proof of expressed sentiment alterations throughout the COVID-19 pandemic” by Jianghao Wang, Yichun Fan, Juan Palacios, Yuchen Chai, Nicolas Guetta-Jeanrenaud, Nick Obradovich, Chenghu Zhou and Siqi Zheng, 17 March 2022, Nature Human Behaviour.
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01312-y
The MIT researchers were supported in part by the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness; support for the other researchers was in part provided by the National Science Foundation of China and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
