A Study of Public Sentiment and Influence of Politics in COVID-19 Related Tweets

An increased usage of social media was observed as the Covid-19 pandemic progressed. We extract tweets relevant to the pandemic from publicly available Twitter data and analyse them to understand the change in public emotions over the year along with a detailed analysis of the topics of discussion. We find public health and politics to be the two most dominant topics. Hence, we perform a study where we compare the performance of existing unsupervised classification methods for the task of detecting whether a tweet is medically relevant or politically motivated.