Social Media Mining and Analysis to support authorities in COVID-19 pandemic preparedness

ABSTRACT

Social media become the main tool for spreading news, discussing ideas and comments on world events. Accordingly, social media represents a precious source to extract insight into public opinion and sentiment. In particular, Twitter has been already recognized as an important source of health-related information, given the amount of news, opinions and information that is shared by both citizens and official sources. Since the very first days of COVID-19 outbreak, people exchanged news, updates, sentiment and opinion about the pandemics. The aim of the study reported in this paper is to explore how social media has been exploited to fight COVID-19. In particular, the attention is given on analyzing engagement and interest in the COVID-19 topics and their evolution on a global scale, identifying infodemics, also analysing people feelings and reactions. © 2022 IEEE.