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Understanding user engagement in online communities during covid-19 pandemic: Evidence from sentiment and semantic analysis on YouTube

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the pandemic has changed the lives of many people and brought dramatic motional experiences. Among many social media platforms, YouTube saw the most significant growth of any social media app among American users during the pandemic, according to the Pew Research Center on 7th April 2021. Exposure to COVID-19 related news can have a significant impact on user engagement on social networks. Different news may trigger different emotions (i.e., anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, or trust), and a user may engage differently in response to the news. On YouTube, user engagement is manifested through actions such as liking, disliking, commenting, or sharing videos. During the pandemic, many users provide constructive comments that are encouraging, respectful, and informative to support each other. We applied sentiment analysis in the study to investigate different emotions and applied semantic analysis to investigate positive appraisal (i.e., encouraging, respectful, and informative) to identify salient factors that can motivate user engagement. The findings of the work shed light on how social network platforms could encourage constructive comments to help people provide emotional support to each other during pandemics through using positive appraisal in online news comments. © 2021 International Consortium for Electronic Business. All rights reserved.