Understanding COVID-19 Public Sentiment Towards Public Health Policies Using Social Media Data

With the outbreak of COVID-19, an overabundance of information related to the virus was released through social media. The disunity amongst US states and the federal government has exacerbated the task of identifying conflicting guidelines and information unaffected by political polarization. Analyzing the public's response to public health policies provides insight into the progression of the pandemic in the US. We gather Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit data and conduct sentiment analysis to determine public sentiment in response to different COVID-19 policies. We found that users had more positive sentiments toward mask policies than to shelter-in-place and fall school reopening policies. Also, we found significant sentiment differences regarding school reopening and mask policies when comparing among several states. Finally, we found that swing states had more conflicting sentiments for policies within their states than did non-swing states. We recommend further research to determine which factors may influence these differences in sentiment.