Trust dynamics in social media crises: a topic-aspect-sentiment analysis of public evaluations during a school food safety incident.

School food safety crises often trigger intense discussion on social media and raise public concerns about institutional governance and public accountability. Yet existing studies have primarily focused on overall sentiment trends, providing limited insight into how public evaluations differ across specific governance issues or how sentiment is expressed toward these issues. Taking the 2024 spoiled meat incident at a middle school in Yunnan Province as a case, this study analyzes 11,016 Weibo posts and comments through a Topic-Aspect-Sentiment framework that combines LDA topic modeling, aspect extraction, and manual sentiment coding. The analysis examines how public evaluations were distributed across governance issues and how they evolved over the course of the crisis. The findings show that public evaluations were concentrated around governance issues related to food safety violations, response conduct, responsibility attribution, and accountability fairness rather than being evenly distributed across issues. Negative evaluations tended to be more concentrated during periods when response actions were perceived as inadequate or when responsibility was viewed as poorly assigned, with negative evaluations concentrated more heavily around these governance dimensions than around the food safety incident itself. During the remediation stage, relatively more favorable evaluations were observed in discussions surrounding regulatory interventions and corrective measures, although negative evaluations remained predominant overall during the observation period. In the later stages of the crisis, sentiment toward procedural legitimacy and accountability outcomes became relatively more balanced, reflecting continued public discussion concerning whether governance problems were being addressed through visible and credible procedures. By linking sentiment analysis to issue-specific evaluations, this study offers a more detailed account of how public evaluative patterns vary across governance issues in high-responsibility crises. The Topic-Aspect-Sentiment framework offers a practical approach for identifying evaluative signals in social media discussions and for examining how public evaluations shift across different issues and stages of a crisis. The findings also provide practical implications for information disclosure, accountability communication, response management, and long-term governance strategies in school food safety crises.