Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Apr 26, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 25, 2023 - Jun 20, 2023
Date Accepted: Feb 27, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
News Coverage of COVID-19 on Social Media and Public’s Negative Emotions: A Computational Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social media has demonstrated to be an increasingly popular and critical tool for users to express their emotions, and it is an important channel for news consumption, through which users' engagement reflects their perceptions and attitudes. Most studies delineate the emotional responses of social media users but seldomly construe the emergence of their emotions, especially negative emotions.
Objective:
We devote our efforts to filling the identified research gap by endeavoring to explain the negative emotions of the audience from the perspective of news coverage on social media. Given our research context of Hong Kong, we chose to examine COVID-19-related news posts and comments beneath on Facebook, the most popular and widely used social platform in Hong Kong.
Methods:
We collected 23,705 Facebook posts with 1,019,317 comments from public pages of news organizations. We used text mining techniques and regression analysis to shed light on the public’s negative emotional responses to news coverage on social media amid the fifth wave of COVID-19 in Hong Kong.
Results:
Our results suggest that occurrences of issues regarding epidemic situations, anti-epidemic measures, and supportive actions are likely to reduce the public’s negative emotions, while comments on the posts mentioning the Central government and the Government of Hong Kong reveal more negativeness. Media tone and post length are found to be associated with user negative emotions as well.
Conclusions:
This work brings public health-related research on social media to a new scenario. The findings contribute to crisis communication and provide suggestions for the government and news organizations on health promotion in time of crises. Clinical Trial: N/A
Citation
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Copyright
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