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The word “digital contact tracing” is often met with different reactions: the reaction that passionately supports it, the reaction that neither supports nor oppose and the one that vehemently opposes it. Those who support the notion of digital contact tracing vouch for its effectiveness and how the complicated process can be made simpler by implementing digital contact tracing, and those who oppose it often criticize the imminent threats it possesses. However, without earning the support of a large population, it would be difficult for any government to implement digital contact tracing to perfection. The purpose of this paper is to analyze, using machine learning, how different continents have different sentiments over digital contact tracing being used as a measure to curb COVID-19.

For the analysis, data were collected from Twitter. Tweets that contain the hashtag and the word “digital contact tracing” were crawled using Python library Tweepy. Tweets across countries of four continents were collected from March 2020 to August 2020. In total, 70,212 tweets were used for this study. Using the machine learning algorithm, the authors detected the sentiment of all the tweets belonging to each continent. Structural topic modeling was used to understand the overall significant issues people voice out by global citizens while sharing their opinions on digital contact tracing.

This study was conducted in two parts. Study one results show that North American and European citizens share more negative sentiments toward “digital contact tracing.” The citizens of the Asian and South American continent mostly share neutral sentiments regarding the digital contact tracing. Overall, only 33% of total tweets were positively related to contact tracing, whereas 52% of the total tweets were neutral. Study two results show that factors such as fear of government using contact tracing to spy on its people, the feeling of being unsafe and contact tracing being used to promote an agenda were the three major issues concerning the overall general public.

Despite numerous studies being conducted about how to implement the contact tracing efficiently, minimal studies were done to explore the possibility and challenges in implementing it. This study fills the gap.

Despite numerous positive aspects of digital contact tracing, the implied nature of contact tracing is still viewed with skepticism. Those in favor of contact tracing often undermine various risks involved with it, while those against it often undermine its positive benefits. However, unless the government and the app makers can convince a significant section of the population to use digital contact apps, desired results cannot be achieved. This study aims to focus on analyzing the perception of citizens belonging to developing countries about digital contact tracing.

For this study, data were collected from Twitter. Tweets containing hashtag and the word “contact tracing” were crawled using Python library Tweepy. Tweets across the top five developing countries (India, Brazil, South Africa, Argentina and Columbia) with high COVID-19 cases were collected for this study. After eliminating tweets of other languages, we selected 50,000 unique English tweets for this study. Using the machine learning algorithm, we have detected the sentiment of all the tweets belonging to each country. Structural topic modeling was performed for the tweets to understand the concerns shared by citizens of the developing countries about digital contact tracing.

The study was conducted in two parts. Study 1 results show that Indians and Brazilians citizens record more negative sentiments toward “digital contact tracing” than other major developing countries. Surprisingly, the citizens of India and Brazil also records more positive sentiments about contact tracing. This shows the polarized nature of the population of both countries while dealing with digital contact tracing. Overall, only 33.3% of total tweets were positively related to contact tracing, while 53.7% of the total tweets were neutral. Study 2 results show that factors such as the reliability of the contact tracing apps, contact tracing may lead to unnecessary panic, invasion of privacy and data misuse as the prominent reasons why the citizens of the five countries feel pessimistic about contact tracing.

After the COVID-19 strikes, numerous studies were conducted to analyze and suggest the best possible way of implementing digital contact tracing to curb COVID. However, only a handful of studies were conducted examining how the general public perceives the concept of digital contact tracing, especially pertaining to developing countries. This study fills that gap.