Background & Objective:

Coronavirus has posed an unprecedented threat to the world. Despite this situation, the Macao citizens continue to stay optimistic by keeping abreast with updates and seeking consoling and showing support for each other in solidarity messages shared by fellows. This study identified these positive messages circulated on Facebook during the outbreak of the pandemic in Macao.

Methods:

A tailored text-mining platform was applied to identify data in their natural settings through extracting and screening postings on Facebook. Keyword extraction based on technique[w1] Term Frequency — Inverse Document Frequency a technique to quantify a word in documents. We generally compute a weight to each word which signifies the importance of the word in the document and corpus[w2] to assist the computer-aided content analysis. To detect latent themes in the public response, the upgraded Mini Batch K-Means algorithm was also employed which constructs word vectors based on the distribution characteristics of word frequency and part of speech in the text content and clusters the specified text in accordance with the preset clustering number. The data used comprises of Facebook messages posted from January 1^st to August 31^st, 2020.

Findings:

The number of Facebook posts changed with the evolvement of the epidemic outbreak. Public responses are sensitive to the epidemic and easily affected by critical events. The topic about “tackling COVID-19” dominated public discussions, followed by “economic concern” and “border restriction”. Positive messages were more likely to be favored in a community during the COVID-19 crisis. A temporal hysteresis was found in the response of solidarity to the crisis. The solidarity messages were conveyed through a variety of post types, mostly presented in the form of notes, followed by albums and photos.

This study reveals a pattern of how solidarity information was propagated on Facebook during the epidemic. The way of disseminating solidarity information online is clear, and which is reasonable to assume that the act of advocating solidarity is accomplished collectively by different online communities. The mainstream media, the primary source of information related to COVID-19, has employed solidarity terms most in its online communication on Facebook, followed by the public service sectors, online independent media and individuals. The result also shows that the solidarity agenda setting by senders through traditional media might give way to agenda negotiation among mainstream media, public service sectors, online independent media, and individuals through online communication.

Investigating the usage of favorable terms and expressions in online communication regarding COVID-19 is crucial to understanding how the public reacts optimistically to the challenge caused by the pandemic which also provides cues for countering the pandemic. The solidarity terms in the context of the pandemic employed by various online communities indicate a social obligation to which the communities, especially mainstream media and public service sectors are morally bound.

Keywords:

public response, COVID-19, solidarity, computer-aided content analysis, thematic analysis, keyword extraction, text-mining

*This research was supported by grant from the Macao Higher Education Bureau (HSS-UMAC-2020-09)