Tracking And Understanding Public Reaction During COVID-19: Saudi Arabia As A Use Case

Aseel Addawood, Alhanouf Alsuwailem, Ali Alohali, Dalal Alajaji, Jaida Alsuhaibani, Fawziah Aljabli, Mashail Alturki

Keywords: Sentiment, opinion, Saudi Arabia

Abstract: The COVID-19 had a great impact on economies and societies around the world. While governments are taking extreme measures to compact the spread of the virus, people are getting effected by such measures. With such measures such as lockdown and social distancing, it become very important to understand the emotional response of the public towards the pandemic. In this paper, we study the reaction of Saudi Arabia citizens towards the pandemic. We utilize a previously collected Arabic tweets collected from January 1, 2020, primarily from hashtags populated from Saudi Arabia. Our results showed that people had kept positive reaction towards the pandemic. This positive reaction was in its highest at the beginning of the pandemic and started to decline as time was passing. Our results showed that people were supporting each other through this pandemic using social Media. This research can help researchers and policy makers in understanding the effect of pandemic on societies.