Virulence of Two Infectious Diseases: Inequality and Covid-19

After the Covid-19 outbreak and the killing of the African American George Floyd, people’s attention focused again on topics such as racism and police violence, as well as socio-economic inequalities in society, from access to healthcare to work and education. The video of Floyd’s death was captured by a passer-by and went viral on social media. Soon different social actors such as citizens, politicians, activists, celebrities and athletes started to use social media to express their opinions and grief. Against this backdrop, this paper aims at exploring the netizens’ perspectives and sentiments towards police and racial issues on Twitter via Big Data Textual Analysis through R software. Specifically, we scraped a set of 1.4kk geocoded tweets in the United States. Text Mining tools, such as Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis, were applied to gain valuable data insights. Results suggests that the conversation about George Floyd revolves around the strong condemnation of this murder and the revitalization of the #BlackLivesMatter.