Using Social Media to Analyze Public Concerns and Policy Responses to COVID-19 in Hong Kong

The outbreak of COVID-19 has caused huge economic and societal disruptions. To fight against the coronavirus, it is critical for policymakers to take swift and effective actions. In this article, we take Hong Kong as a case study, aiming to leverage social media data to support policymakers’ policy-making activities in different phases. First, in the agenda setting phase, we facilitate policymakers to identify key issues to be addressed during COVID-19. In particular, we design a novel epidemic awareness index to continuously monitor public discussion hotness of COVID-19 based on large-scale data collected from social media platforms. Then we identify the key issues by analyzing the posts and comments of the extensively discussed topics. Second, in the policy evaluation phase, we enable policymakers to conduct real-time evaluation of anti-epidemic policies. Specifically, we develop an accurate Cantonese sentiment classification model to measure the public satisfaction with anti-epidemic policies and propose a keyphrase extraction technique to further extract public opinions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which conducts a large-scale social media analysis of COVID-19 in Hong Kong. The analytical results reveal some interesting findings: (1) there is a very low correlation between the number of confirmed cases and the public discussion hotness of COVID-19. The major public concern in the early stage is the shortage of anti-epidemic items. (2) The top-3 anti-epidemic measures with the greatest public satisfaction are daily press conference on COVID-19 updates, border closure, and social distancing rules.