Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Understanding during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Spain and Its Impact on Digital Ecosystems

Abstract

COVID-19 has changed our lives forever. The world we knew until now has been transformed and nowadays we live in a completely new scenario in a perpetual restructuring transition, in which the way we live, relate, and communicate with others has been altered permanently. Within this context, risk communication is playing a decisive role when informing, transmitting, and channeling the flow of information in society. COVID-19 has posed a real pandemic risk management challenge in terms of impact, preparedness, response, and mitigation by governments, health organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), mass media, and stakeholders. In this study, we monitored the digital ecosystems during March and April 2020, and we obtained a sample of 106,261 communications through the analysis of APIs and Web Scraping techniques. This study examines how social media has affected risk communication in uncertain contexts and its impact on the emotions and sentiments derived from the semantic analysis in Spanish society during the COVID-19 pandemic.