Citation

Ujah OI, Ogbu CE, Kirby RS. AIMS Public Health 2023; 10(4): 739-754.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, American Institute of Mathematical Sciences Press)

DOI

10.3934/publichealth.2023050

PMID

38187902

PMCID

PMC10764967

Abstract

This study examined discourses related to an Indonesian soccer stadium stampede on 1st October 2022 using comments posted on Twitter. We conducted a lexicon-based sentiment analysis to identify the sentiments and emotions expressed in tweets and performed structural topic modeling to identify latent themes in the discourse. The majority of tweets (87.8%) expressed negative sentiments, while 8.2% and 4.0% of tweets expressed positive and neutral sentiments, respectively. The most common emotion expressed was fear (29.3%), followed by sadness and anger. Of the 19 themes identified, "Deaths and mortality" was the most prominent (15.1%), followed by "family impact". The negative stampede discourse was related to public concerns such as "vigil" and "calls for bans and suspension," while positive discourse focused more on the impact of the stampede. Public health institutions can leverage the volume and rapidity of social media to improve disaster prevention strategies.

Language: en

Keywords

disaster preparedness; mass gatherings; natural language processing; stampede; twitter