With the unprecedented events of the las 18+ months all around the world and more

specifically in Australia where states like Victoria have experienced the longest lockdown
period in the world during the pandemic (262 days and counting since March 2020)
(Aljazeera,2020) and the recent announcement of a nation-wide roadmap to put an end to
it, people have turned to social media to express their views and feelings in regards to being
in lockdown and the government’s plan to end it.

Research questions:
• What is the “Twittersphere” sentiment on Australian lockdown related policies and
its implementation/exit strategies?
• Are lockdowns perceived merely as a health measure or has it transcended to other
spheres of Australian society?

Analysis
Data was collected over one week (Study period: 11/10/2021-18/10/2021 using Tags tool I
scraped and cleaned data
Filtered posts under the following parameters:
• Posts must be in English
• Posts must have a context which is relevant to this research.
• Meaningless mentions
• The user location must be Australia (this in order to make it trustworthy in terms of
relatability)
After removing duplicates and retweets from 2951 total tweets, 2146 were retweets and
130 post replies I had around 675 original tweets

Slide: I then categorised tweets using a codebook

• Positive and negative sentiment
• Health and wellbeing
• Education
• Entertainment and leisure
• Real estate
• News
• Politics
bars

Sentiment
Social media analysis reflects a 2:1 ratio of positive sentiment Tweets to negative sentiment
among users who are part of this base.(Note that political views and issues weren’t provided
with any sentiment at all for this research and were treated as raw data).

Transcendence
The imaginary related to the word lockdown has transcended into more than what
Cambridge defines as: “a period in which people are
not allowed to leave their homes or travel freely, because of a dangerous disease”.
It has turned into a word that transpires to the political, education and even entertainment
facets of Australian society, with 220 (47.5%) of the Tweets and retweets involving political
views, being 8.5 times bigger that the amount of health and wellbeing Tweets (26 or 5.6% of
the final base)

Conclusion

• Australian-based Twitter users have a positive opinion about the recent

development of lockdowns and more importantly and specifically the announcement
of a roadmap and a date for them to end.
• Lockdown as a topic of discussion has gained a more political connotation into
Australian Twittersphere ahead of the expected health-related association.