Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: May 3, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: May 9, 2020 - May 15, 2020
Date Accepted: Sep 14, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Sep 16, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
The Resurgence of Cyber-Racism COVID-19 Pandemic and its After Effects
ABSTRACT
Background:
With the increasing number of patients of COVID-19 all over the world, a particular section of the world population has been blaming China and World Health Organization for the spread of this disease. Due to this, a number of cases related to racism and hatred have been encountered all over. With Donald Trump using the term Chinese Virus, this cause has gained momentum and Ethnic Asians are now being targeted. The online situation also looks the same where certain segment of people are posting hateful comments and posts.
Objective:
The research study has been done to analyze the increasing racism online during COVID-19. This research aims to analyze the emotions and sentiments that have been associated with the terms like CHinese Virus, Wuhan Virus and Chinese Corona Virus.
Methods:
16,000 tweets ranging from 11th April 2020 to 16th April 2020 were analyzed to find out the sentiments and emotions associated with the posts. This research has been done on R. Twitter API and SentimentR package were used for the collection of the tweets and then evaluating the sentiments respectively.
Results:
This results suggested that majority of the tweets were of negative sentiments and carried emotions of fear, sadness, anger and disgust. There were a high usage of slurs and profane words. Also, terms like China LieD People Died, Wuhan Health Organization, Kung Flu, China Must Pay and CCP is Terrorist were used a lot in these tweets.
Conclusions:
This study gives an insight of the rising hatred and cyber racism on Twitter. This study has analyzed the twitter posts and concludes that there are a majority of people who are tweeting with mostly negative sentiments for ethnic Asian, China and WHO.
Citation
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