Sense and Sensibility: Characterizing Social Media Users Regarding the Use of Controversial Terms for COVID-19.
Sense and Sensibility: Characterizing Social Media Users Regarding the Use of Controversial Terms for COVID-19.
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DOI：
10.1109/tbdata.2020.2996401
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发表时间：
2021-12
影响因子：
7.2
通讯作者：
Luo J
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lyu H;Chen L;Wang Y;Luo J
随着2019新型冠状病毒在全球的传播，尽管世界卫生组织已正式将该疾病命名为COVID - 19，但一个有争议的词汇——“中国病毒”仍被很多人使用。与此同时，全球网络媒体关于新冠疫情相关种族攻击的报道稳步增加，其中大部分是反华或反亚裔的。随着疫情日益严重，更多人开始在推特等社交媒体平台上谈论它。当他们提及新冠疫情时，主要有两种方式：使用像“中国病毒”或“武汉病毒”这样有争议的词汇，或者使用像“冠状病毒”这样无争议的词汇。在本文中，我们试图对使用有争议词汇的推特用户和使用无争议词汇的用户进行特征描述。我们使用Tweepy应用程序接口获取了1700万条相关推文及其作者信息。我们发现这两组推特用户在人口统计学特征、用户层面的特征（如关注者数量、政治关注状况）以及地理位置等方面存在显著差异。此外，我们应用分类模型来预测更有可能使用有争议词汇的推特用户。据我们所知，这是第一项基于大规模社交媒体的研究，旨在描述在重大危机期间用户使用有争议词汇的情况。
With the world-wide development of 2019 novel coronavirus, although WHO has officially announced the disease as COVID-19, one controversial term - “Chinese Virus” is still being used by a great number of people. In the meantime, global online media coverage about COVID-19-related racial attacks increases steadily, most of which are anti-Chinese or anti-Asian. As this pandemic becomes increasingly severe, more people start to talk about it on social media platforms such as Twitter. When they refer to COVID-19, there are mainly two ways: using controversial terms like “Chinese Virus” or “Wuhan Virus”, or using non-controversial terms like “Coronavirus”. In this article, we attempt to characterize the Twitter users who use controversial terms and those who use non-controversial terms. We use the Tweepy API to retrieve 17 million related tweets and the information of their authors. We find the significant differences between these two groups of Twitter users across their demographics, user-level features like the number of followers, political following status, as well as their geo-locations. Moreover, we apply classification models to predict Twitter users who are more likely to use controversial terms. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale social media-based study to characterize users with respect to their usage of controversial terms during a major crisis.