Public Sentiment and Demand for Used Cars after A Large-Scale Disaster: Social Media Sentiment Analysis with Facebook Pages

There have been various studies analyzing public sentiment after a large-scale disaster. However, few studies have focused on the relationship between public sentiment on social media and its results on people’s activities in the real world. In this paper, we conduct a long-term sentiment analysis after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011 using Facebook Pages with the aim of investigating the correlation between public sentiment and people’s actual needs in areas damaged by water disasters. In addition, we try to analyze whether different types of disasterrelated communication created different kinds of relationships on people’s activities in the physical world. Our analysis reveals that sentiment of geo-info-related communication, which might be affected by sentiment inside a damaged area, had a positive correlation with the prices of used cars in the damaged area. On the other hand, the sentiment of disaster-interest-basedcommunication, which might be affected more by people who were interested in the disaster, but were outside the damaged area, had a negative correlation with the prices of used cars. The result could be interpreted to mean that when people begin to recover, used-car prices rise because they become more positive in their sentiment. This study suggests that, for long-term disaster-recovery analysis, we need to consider the different characteristics of online communication posted by locals directly affected by the disaster and non-locals not directly affected by the disaster.