To what degree do mass publics learn, such that they can engage in the substantive debates of policy design? And how does the nature of that learning relate to public trust? These questions are both relevant to policy makers and central to the literature on learning, but scholars have struggled to draw a clear link between public sentiment, modes of elite and mass public learning, and the maintenance (or loss) of trust in government decisions. We argue that social media offers a particularly useful lens through which to examine the relationship between public sentiment and opinions regarding political events, how those lead to public engagement around policies, and how political elites’ responses to that engagement contribute to the maintenance of public trust. Drawing on the case of Canada, we use Twitter to construct a database of over 450,000 distinct tweets between March 10th and September 10th, 2020 on the topic of child care and school closures and re-openings during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using automated coding, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis expressed across government actors and the Canadian public, we find evidence that, while the Canadian public demonstrated increasingly negative sentiment and high levels of anxiety, public trust—including support for government institutions in Canada—remained high. We posit that this finding is linked to the fact that the public was heavily engaged in conversations about the specific instruments and settings needed to ensure a safe return to school in the fall of 2020. That ability to engage in public puzzling alongside governments served to maintain trust, even under conditions of uncertainty and stress.
