General Awareness and Responses to COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The ongoing pandemic situation of COVID-19 has impacted people across nations while taking social media by storm with its massive pool of information. As social media platforms are full of horserace reporting and uncritical or even fake updates most of the time, users should respond carefully during a crisis like COVID-19 pandemic while consuming and sharing updates. The current study presents an exploratory analysis of and highlights language use in terms of users' general awareness of the crisis and their responses on social media platforms through a sentiment analysis of 805 Twitter messages related to the COVID-19 pandemic in India. The findings reported users' varied sentiments while expressing their general awareness about the crisis and its widespread outbreak. It also reported their use of cognizant verbal expressions and abusive words as an expression for dealing with panic of the crisis.