Which world leader gave the best COVID-19 speech?

Everyone has their own opinion on how our world leaders have handled their communication of the Coronavirus pandemic, but what does the data say?

At Journey Further, we created a tool that can analyse a website’s link profile by looking at recurring keywords, topics, frequency, relevancy and sentiment. This gives us a data-led process to judge link profile relevancy, allowing us to understand the full characteristics of a link profile and drive organic search performance.

But instead of analysing websites, we used the tool to analyse key speeches from English-speaking world leaders given during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Here’s what we found:

Boris Johnson has given the most negative speeches

The UK Prime Minister is the world leader who has spoken with the most negativity around COVID-19 and by some distance. 57% of the times Boris Johnson mentioned the illness were perceived to be negative, while Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump were revealed as the most positive leaders.

Boris Johnson and Donald Trump spoke with the most fear

Despite being one of the most positive when talking about COVID-19, Donald Trump was also revealed to be one of the world leaders who spoke with the most fear. He was only beaten by Boris Johnson. In comparison, Jacinda Ardern, Justin Trudeau, Scott Morrison and Cyril Ramaphosa all spoke with very little fear when delivering their key speeches.

Countries are key for most leaders

When looking at the most referenced entities in each speech, five out of six leaders spoke mostly about a single country. For Ardern, Trudeau, Morrison and Ramaphosa, this was their own country. Interestingly, Donald Trump also spoke about a country the most, however it was China and not the USA. Boris Johnson’s most referenced entity was the NHS.

Justin Trudeau was the most optimistic

When analysing the emotion across all of the key speeches, Journey Further found 61% of Justin Trudeau’s speech was perceived as optimistic, while South African leader, Cyril Ramaphosa’s was regarded as overwhelmingly sad, with a score of over 60%.

How does the analysis work?

We used a natural language understanding tool to provide insight into how speeches given during the COVID-19 pandemic could be perceived by the audience. The tool analysed the speeches given by Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, Scott Morrison and Cyril Ramaphosa, and pulled out keywords that were most relevant within that speech as well as the sentiment and emotion of the speech, for example, fear, optimism or anger.