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While ride-hailing ridership declined in 2020 due to COVID-19 induced restrictions like stay-at-home orders, food/grocery delivery services became quasi-essential. This study investigates if and how public perceptions of gig work related to platform-based ride-hailing and food/grocery delivery services changed during the early stages of the pandemic. We collected a sample of 23,845 Twitter posts (‘tweets’) related to these platform-based services within two-week periods before and after the US COVID-19 emergency declaration. Sentiment analysis on tweets was conducted to investigate changes in public perception of gig work. Tweet content was analyzed by descriptively coding about 10% of the sample of tweets manually along ten different dimensions (e.g., personal experience, informative, and about driver); then we used thematic analysis to gain an understanding about the public’s views towards gig work …