Background: With the pandemic of COVID-19 and the release of related policies, discussions about the COVID-19 are widespread online. Social media becomes a reliable source for understanding public opinions toward this virus outbreak.
Objective: This study aims to explore public opinions toward COVID-19 on social media by comparing the differences in sentiment changes and discussed topics between California and New York in the United States.
Methods: A dataset with COVID-19-related Twitter posts was collected from March 5, 2020 to April 2, 2020 using Twitter streaming API. After removing any posts unrelated to COVID-19, as well as posts that contain promotion and commercial information, two individual datasets were created based on the geolocation tags with tweets, one containing tweets from California state and the other from New York state. Sentiment analysis was conducted to obtain the sentiment score for each COVID-19 tweet. Topic modeling was applied to identify top topics related to COVID-19.
Results: While the number of COVID-19 cases increased more rapidly in New York than in California in March 2020, the number of tweets posted has a similar trend over time in both states. COVID-19 tweets from California had more negative sentiment scores than New York. There were some fluctuations in sentiment scores in both states over time, which might correlate with the policy changes and the severity of COVID-19 pandemic. The topic modeling results showed that the popular topics in both California and New York states are similar, with "protective measures" as the most prevalent topic associated with COVID-19 in both states.
Conclusions: Twitter users from California had more negative sentiment scores towards COVID-19 than Twitter users from New York. The prevalent topics about COVID-19 discussed in both states were similar with some slight differences.