Understanding Citizens' Response to Social Activities on Twitter in US Metropolises During the COVID-19 Recovery...

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to hold an important place in the collective memory as of 2024. As of March 2024, >676 million cases, 6 million deaths, and 13 billion vaccine doses have been reported. It is crucial to evaluate sociopsychological impacts as well as public health indicators such as these to understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study aimed to explore the sentiments of residents of major US cities toward restrictions on social activities in 2022 during the transitional phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, from the peak of the pandemic to its gradual decline. By illuminating people's susceptibility to COVID-19, we provide insights into the general sentiment trends during the recovery phase of the pandemic.

To analyze these trends, we collected posts (N=119,437) on the social media platform Twitter (now X) created by people living in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago from December 2021 to December 2022, which were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in similar ways. A total of 47,111 unique users authored these posts. In addition, for privacy considerations, any identifiable information, such as author IDs and usernames, was excluded, retaining only the text for analysis. Then, we developed a sentiment estimation model by fine-tuning a large language model on the collected data and used it to analyze how citizens' sentiments evolved throughout the pandemic.

In the evaluation of models, GPT-3.5 Turbo with fine-tuning outperformed GPT-3.5 Turbo without fine-tuning and Robustly Optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa)-large with fine-tuning, demonstrating significant accuracy (0.80), recall (0.79), precision (0.79), and F₁-score (0.79). The findings using GPT-3.5 Turbo with fine-tuning reveal a significant relationship between sentiment levels and actual cases in all 3 cities. Specifically, the correlation coefficient for New York City is 0.89 (95% CI 0.81-0.93), for Los Angeles is 0.39 (95% CI 0.14-0.60), and for Chicago is 0.65 (95% CI 0.47-0.78). Furthermore, feature words analysis showed that COVID-19-related keywords were replaced with non-COVID-19-related keywords in New York City and Los Angeles from January 2022 onward and Chicago from March 2022 onward.

The results show a gradual decline in sentiment and interest in restrictions across all 3 cities as the pandemic approached its conclusion. These results are also ensured by a sentiment estimation model fine-tuned on actual Twitter posts. This study represents the first attempt from a macro perspective to depict sentiment using a classification model created with actual data from the period when COVID-19 was prevalent. This approach can be applied to the spread of other infectious diseases by adjusting search keywords for observational data.