COVID-19 Twitter Database: Turkey Sample

This study has been established to determine the effect of the COVID-19 virus, which has been affecting the world since the first months of 2020, on the agenda of Turkish-speaking Twitter users. This work can be seen as a complement to the “COVID-19: The First Public Coronavirus Twitter Dataset” and “GeoCoV19” the largest Twitter Database. Those two datasets are a comprehensive Twitter dataset composed of several languages. However, the word pools of those studies are very narrow and, the tweets are not separated by themes, consequently not feasible for public opinion research. In this paper, we present "COVID-19 Twitter Database: Turkey Sample", which is the first study to analyze the change in Turkish Twittersphere during the pandemic. Around 4.5 million Turkish tweets collected before and after the official announcement of the first coronavirus case in Turkey, 11 March 2020. We determine keywords with a random Twitter search for six themes: politics, international relations, economics, religion, COVID-19, disinformation. As a result, for each of the themes, we have identified public opinion change using quantitative text analysis methods.