No Arabic abstract
Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, users are increasingly turning to online services. An increase in social media usage has also been observed, leading to the suspicion that this has also raised cyberbullying. In this initial work, we explore the possibility of an increase in cyberbullying incidents due to the pandemic and high social media usage. To evaluate this trend, we collected 454,046 cyberbullying-related public tweets posted between January 1st, 2020 -- June 7th, 2020. We summarize the tweets containing multiple keywords into their daily counts. Our analysis showed the existence of at most one statistically significant changepoint for most of these keywords, which were primarily located around the end of March. Almost all these changepoint time-locations can be attributed to COVID-19, which substantiates our initial hypothesis of an increase in cyberbullying through analysis of discussions over Twitter.
The objective of the study is to examine coronavirus disease (COVID-19) related discussions, concerns, and sentiments that emerged from tweets posted by Twitter users. We analyze 4 million Twitter messages related to the COVID-19 pandemic using a list of 25 hashtags such as coronavirus, COVID-19, quarantine from March 1 to April 21 in 2020. We use a machine learning approach, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to identify popular unigram, bigrams, salient topics and themes, and sentiments in the collected Tweets. Popular unigrams include virus, lockdown, and quarantine. Popular bigrams include COVID-19, stay home, corona virus, social distancing, and new cases. We identify 13 discussion topics and categorize them into five different themes, such as public health measures to slow the spread of COVID-19, social stigma associated with COVID-19, coronavirus news cases and deaths, COVID-19 in the United States, and coronavirus cases in the rest of the world. Across all identified topics, the dominant sentiments for the spread of coronavirus are anticipation that measures that can be taken, followed by a mixed feeling of trust, anger, and fear for different topics. The public reveals a significant feeling of fear when they discuss the coronavirus new cases and deaths than other topics. The study shows that Twitter data and machine learning approaches can be leveraged for infodemiology study by studying the evolving public discussions and sentiments during the COVID-19. Real-time monitoring and assessment of the Twitter discussion and concerns can be promising for public health emergency responses and planning. Already emerged pandemic fear, stigma, and mental health concerns may continue to influence public trust when there occurs a second wave of COVID-19 or a new surge of the imminent pandemic.
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a deep impact on the lives of the entire world population, inducing a participated societal debate. As in other contexts, the debate has been the subject of several d/misinformation campaigns; in a quite unprecedented fashion, however, the presence of false information has seriously put at risk the public health. In this sense, detecting the presence of malicious narratives and identifying the kinds of users that are more prone to spread them represent the first step to limit the persistence of the former ones. In the present paper we analyse the semantic network observed on Twitter during the first Italian lockdown (induced by the hashtags contained in approximately 1.5 millions tweets published between the 23rd of March 2020 and the 23rd of April 2020) and study the extent to which various discursive communities are exposed to d/misinformation arguments. As observed in other studies, the recovered discursive communities largely overlap with traditional political parties, even if the debated topics concern different facets of the management of the pandemic. Although the themes directly related to d/misinformation are a minority of those discussed within our semantic networks, their popularity is unevenly distributed among the various discursive communities.
COVID-19s impact has surpassed from personal and global health to our social life. In terms of digital presence, it is speculated that during pandemic, there has been a significant rise in cyberbullying. In this paper, we have examined the hypothesis of whether cyberbullying and reporting of such incidents have increased in recent times. To evaluate the speculations, we collected cyberbullying related public tweets (N=454,046) posted between January 1st, 2020 -- June 7th, 2020. A simple visual frequentist analysis ignores serial correlation and does not depict changepoints as such. To address correlation and a relatively small number of time points, Bayesian estimation of the trends is proposed for the collected data via an autoregressive Poisson model. We show that this new Bayesian method detailed in this paper can clearly show the upward trend on cyberbullying-related tweets since mid-March 2020. However, this evidence itself does not signify a rise in cyberbullying but shows a correlation of the crisis with the discussion of such incidents by individuals. Our work emphasizes a critical issue of cyberbullying and how a global crisis impacts social media abuse and provides a trend analysis model that can be utilized for social media data analysis in general.
Successful navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic is predicated on public cooperation with safety measures and appropriate perception of risk, in which emotion and attention play important roles. Signatures of public emotion and attention are present in social media data, thus natural language analysis of this text enables near-to-real-time monitoring of indicators of public risk perception. We compare key epidemiological indicators of the progression of the pandemic with indicators of the public perception of the pandemic constructed from ~20 million unique Covid-19-related tweets from 12 countries posted between 10th March -- 14th June 2020. We find evidence of psychophysical numbing: Twitter users increasingly fixate on mortality, but in a decreasingly emotional and increasingly analytic tone. Semantic network analysis based on word co-occurrences reveals changes in the emotional framing of Covid-19 casualties that are consistent with this hypothesis. We also find that the average attention afforded to national Covid-19 mortality rates is modelled accurately with the Weber-Fechner and power law functions of sensory perception. Our parameter estimates for these models are consistent with estimates from psychological experiments, and indicate that users in this dataset exhibit differential sensitivity by country to the national Covid-19 death rates. Our work illustrates the potential utility of social media for monitoring public risk perception and guiding public communication during crisis scenarios.
The outbreak of COVID-19 highlights the need for a more harmonized, less privacy-concerning, easily accessible approach to monitoring the human mobility that has been proved to be associated with the viral transmission. In this study, we analyzed 587 million tweets worldwide to see how global collaborative efforts in reducing human mobility are reflected from the user-generated information at the global, country, and the U.S. state scale. Considering the multifaceted nature of mobility, we propose two types of distance: the single-day distance and the cross-day distance. To quantify the responsiveness in certain geographical regions, we further propose a mobility-based responsive index (MRI) that captures the overall degree of mobility changes within a time window. The results suggest that mobility patterns obtained from Twitter data are amendable to quantitatively reflect the mobility dynamics. Globally, the proposed two distances had greatly deviated from their baselines after March 11, 2020, when WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic. The considerably less periodicity after the declaration suggests that the protection measures have obviously affected peoples travel routines. The country scale comparisons reveal the discrepancies in responsiveness, evidenced by the contrasting mobility patterns in different epidemic phases. We find that the triggers of mobility changes correspond well with the national announcements of mitigation measures. In the U.S., the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on mobility is distinct. However, the impacts varied substantially among states. The strong mobility recovering momentum is further fueled by the Black Lives Matter protests, potentially fostering the second wave of infections in the U.S.