The COVID-19 pandemic has enormously affected the economic situation worldwide, including in Indonesia resulting in 30 million Indonesian tumbling into penury. The Ministry of Social Affairs initiated a program to distribute social assistance aimed at the poorest households. ‘Aplikasi Cek Bansos’ is a public service application that aims to validate their status towards the social assistance program. Understanding the public sentiment and factors affecting public satisfaction levels is crucial to be performed. The goal of this study is to perform a comparative study of supervised machine learning to learn the sentiment of the public and the dominant variable resulting in public satisfaction. Support vector machine, Naïve Bayes dan K-nearest neighbor (KNN) are performed to seek the highest accuracy. This experiment discovered that the KNN algorithm produced outstanding performance where the accuracy hit 99.21%. Sentiment prediction indicated negative perception as the majority covering 83.81%. Trigrams analysis is performed to learn themes affecting satisfaction levels toward the application. Negative themes are grouped into the following categories: App instability, hope for improvement, navigation issues, and low-quality content. Some recommendations are offered for the Ministry of Social Affairs and developers, to overcome negative feedback and enhance public satisfaction level towards the application. © 2024, Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.