  The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people's lives around the world on an
unprecedented scale. We intend to investigate hoarding behaviors in response to
the pandemic using large-scale social media data. First, we collect
hoarding-related tweets shortly after the outbreak of the coronavirus. Next, we
analyze the hoarding and anti-hoarding patterns of over 42,000 unique Twitter
users in the United States from March 1 to April 30, 2020, and dissect the
hoarding-related tweets by age, gender, and geographic location. We find the
percentage of females in both hoarding and anti-hoarding groups is higher than
that of the general Twitter user population. Furthermore, using topic modeling,
we investigate the opinions expressed towards the hoarding behavior by
categorizing these topics according to demographic and geographic groups. We
also calculate the anxiety scores for the hoarding and anti-hoarding related
tweets using a lexical approach. By comparing their anxiety scores with the
baseline Twitter anxiety score, we reveal further insights. The LIWC anxiety
mean for the hoarding-related tweets is significantly higher than the baseline
Twitter anxiety mean. Interestingly, beer has the highest calculated anxiety
score compared to other hoarded items mentioned in the tweets.
