  During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, social networks become the
preeminent medium for communication, social discussion, and entertainment.
Social network users are regularly expressing their opinions about the impacts
of the coronavirus pandemic. Therefore, social networks serve as a reliable
source for studying the topics, emotions, and attitudes of users that are
discussed during the pandemic. In this paper, we investigate the reactions and
attitudes of people towards topics raised on social media platforms. We
collected data of two large-scale COVID-19 datasets from Twitter and Instagram
for six and three months, respectively. The paper analyzes the reaction of
social network users on different aspects including sentiment analysis, topics
detection, emotions, and geo-temporal characteristics of our dataset. We show
that the dominant sentiment reactions on social media are neutral while the
most discussed topics by social network users are about health issues. The
paper examines the countries that attracted more posts and reactions from
people, as well as the distribution of health-related topics discussed in the
most mentioned countries. We shed light on the temporal shift of topics over
countries. Our results show that posts from the top-mentioned countries
influence and attract more reaction worldwide than posts from other parts of
the world.
