A Twitter Corpus Study of the Public Reactions to Covid-19 Measures in Qatar

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has affected millions of people around the world since its emergence from China. Countries around the world have adopted radical measures to control the spread of the virus. These measures have in many ways altered social life: physical forms of communication have been drastically reduced, and people have started to socialize and express their feelings online. In Qatar, these new social norms have been reflected mainly in the usage of the social platform “Twitter” where people have expressed the highlights of the measures taken by the government. This research aimed to understand people’s emotions and opinions in response to, arguably, the most talked-about topics of interest during the pandemic. A total of 5,138 Arabic tweets between February 29 and August 30, 2020, were collected, in addition to the period of December 4 through 24, 2020, and were classified based on sentiment and emotion analysis. These tweets were then classified into four main topics: the number of confirmed cases, education, “EHTERAZ” contact-tracing application, and vaccines. Overall, the results showed that negative tweets outweighed positive tweets in all four topics. The first topic showed a clear shift in the public’s opinions and emotions—from negative ones portraying fear and anger to positive portraying happiness—as the number of confirmed cases varied over time. The topic of education mostly received negative feedback due to the shift to online learning and its consequences. The topic of “EHTERAZ” also received negative tweets mainly due to technical issues as well as privacy concerns; however, some users praised the application for its potential benefits of controlling the spread of the virus. Similar to “EHTERAZ,” the topic of vaccines mostly received negative tweets, while some saw it as positive. People with negative views were mostly afraid of the accelerated development cycles, whereas people with positive views expressed happiness in the form of hope as they believed that these vaccines would effectively end the pandemic.