The team also discovered the influence of former US President Donald Trump on Twitter's conversation around Covid-19. "We observe that the negative perception in tweets shows spikes from October 2 to 6 2020, probably related to the news released on October 2 that (Trump) tested positive for Covid-19. After this event, the negative perception in tweets started dropping steadily," Maier said. Furthermore, the increase of Covid-19 deaths in the US, after November 2020, coincided with a pronounced decrease in negative perception -- a paradox.

Attempting to understand this paradox, the team analysed the vaccination statistics of the US, the UK, and Canada, revealing a strong relation between dropping negative perception of the pandemic on Twitter and increased vaccination in those countries. A previous study into Twitter sentiment revealed that out of 4 million tweets written in English, most tweets came from the US (42.5 per cent), India (10.8 per cent), Canada (5.9 per cent), and the UK (5.9 per cent).

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"The takeaway message from this paper is as follows: the people's negativity has dropped," they wrote. "In particular, people's negativity declined almost linearly as the vaccination rose exponentially, suggesting slow emotional adaptation to a rapidly evolving situation. For this reason, it seems reasonable to affirm that the vaccination campaign has played a crucial role in decreasing people's negativity." However, there is no "definitive answer" on whether the decline in negative perception on Twitter is related to the company taking action against Covid misinformation/disinformation, Maier said.

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