Emotional Analysis of Twitter Posts During the First Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Greece: Infoveillance Study

Background The effectiveness of public health measures depends upon a community’s compliance as well as on its positive or negative emotions. Objective The purpose of this study was to perform an analysis of the expressed emotions in English tweets by Greek Twitter users during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Greece. Methods The period of this study was from January 25, 2020 to June 30, 2020. Data collection was performed by using appropriate search words with the filter-streaming application programming interface of Twitter. The emotional analysis of the tweets that satisfied the inclusion criteria was achieved using a deep learning approach that performs better by utilizing recurrent neural networks on sequences of characters. Emotional epidemiology tools such as the 6 basic emotions, that is, joy, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, and anger based on the Paul Ekman classification were adopted. Results The most frequent emotion that was detected in the tweets was “surprise” at the emerging contagion, while the imposed isolation resulted mostly in “anger” (odds ratio 2.108, 95% CI 0.986-4.506). Although the Greeks felt rather safe during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, their positive and negative emotions reflected a masked “flight or fight” or “fear versus anger” response to the contagion. Conclusions The findings of our study show that emotional analysis emerges as a valid tool for epidemiology evaluations, design, and public health strategy and surveillance.