Gauging opinions about the COVID-19: a multi-channel social media approach

ABSTRACT

Social media has been engulfed with one burning epidemic – the Coronavirus impacting both the society and businesses. This study examines the impact of social media opinions through a multi-channel social media approach encompassing Twitter, Facebook and YouTube from February 10^th to March 10^th, 2020. A country-wise analysis is performed for both major developed and developing economies, like the US, India, China, Italy and Iran. The analysis reveals that public opinion is unanimously negative. The impact of the pandemic on businesses, society and education has been highlighted to help formulate country-specific strategies to mitigate stigmatization of people impacted by the virus.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• electronic governance
• public perception
• sentiment analysis
• R
• enterprise social networks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.