COVID-19 as a Radicalizing Event?

• In Event: Understanding the Future of Hate: Concepts, Theories, and Trends in Bias Crimes Research

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in myriad societal harms, including death, illness, economic woes, mental health trauma, and food system disruptions. Similarly, it led to a surge in hateful and offensive rhetoric both online and offline, as well as hate-fueled violence. This study explores the dynamics of offensive tweets related to the pandemic. Specifically, we explore the Twitter habits of a sample of online users before and during the pandemic to understand if users became more likely to engage in offensive and extremist online behavior after the commencement of the pandemic. To do so, we collected a dataset of over 507 million tweets for over a year and half and used a BERT classifier to categorize tweets as offensive or non-offensive and track the following habits of Twitter users. Initial findings show that users generally became more likely to share offensive tweets after the pandemic began. Likewise, users began to follow more extremist Twitter accounts as the pandemic progressed. Our results suggest that for some online users, the COVID-19 pandemic served as an event pushing them towards more extreme social media behavior.

Authors

• Matthew Costello, Clemson University

• Long Cheng, Clemson University

• Feng Lou, Clemson University

• Hongxin Hu, University of Buffalo, SUNY

• Song Liao, Clemson University

• Nishant Vishwamitra, University of Buffalo, SUNY