The Burden of Being a Bridge: Understanding the Role of Multilingual Users during the COVID-19 Pandemic
The Burden of Being a Bridge: Understanding the Role of Multilingual Users during the COVID-19 Pandemic
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发表时间：
2021
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通讯作者：
Ninghan Chen;Xihui Chen;Zhiqiang Zhong;Jun Pang
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作者：
Ninghan Chen;Xihui Chen;Zhiqiang Zhong;Jun Pang
COVID-19疫情的爆发引发在线社交网络的信息泛滥。因此，政府必须确保其官方信息超过错误信息，并有效地传达给公众。目前受病毒影响最严重的一些国家和地区，包括欧洲、南美洲和印度，面临着另一个困难：多种语言。了解多语种用户在信息传播过程中的具体作用，对于这些国家和地区的政府调整其出版战略至关重要。在本文中，我们调查了多语言用户在COVID-19大流行期间在流行社交网络上传播信息的作用。我们收集了一个大规模的Twitter数据集，来自一个人口稠密的多语言地区，从大流行开始。通过这个数据集，我们成功地证明了多语言用户在传播COVID-19相关信息方面发挥了桥梁作用。我们进一步研究了多语言使用者的心理健康，并表明，作为桥梁，多语言使用者往往更消极。最近的一项心理学研究证实，过度接触社交媒体可能会导致负面情绪。
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic triggers infodemic over online social networks. It is thus important for governments to ensure their official messages outpace misinformation and efficiently reach the public. Some countries and regions that are currently worst affected by the virus including Europe, South America and India, encounter an additional difficulty: multilingualism. Understanding the specific role of multilingual users in the process of information diffusion is critical to adjust their publishing strategies for the governments of such countries and regions. In this paper, we investigate the role of multilingual users in diffusing information during the COVID-19 pandemic on popular social networks. We collect a large-scale dataset of Twitter from a populated multilingual region from the beginning of the pandemic. With this dataset, we successfully show that multilingual users act as bridges in diffusing COVID-19 related information. We further study the mental health of multilingual users and show that being the bridges, multilingual users tend to be more negative. This is confirmed by a recent psychological study stating that excessive exposure to social media may result in a negative mood.