Predicting Anti-Asian Hateful Users on Twitter during COVID-19

Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Claire Seungeun Lee, Bogang Jun, Yong-Yeol Ahn


Abstract
We investigate predictors of anti-Asian hate among Twitter users throughout COVID-19. With the rise of xenophobia and polarization that has accompanied widespread social media usage in many nations, online hate has become a major social issue, attracting many researchers. Here, we apply natural language processing techniques to characterize social media users who began to post anti-Asian hate messages during COVID-19. We compare two user groups—those who posted anti-Asian slurs and those who did not—with respect to a rich set of features measured with data prior to COVID-19 and show that it is possible to predict who later publicly posted anti-Asian slurs. Our analysis of predictive features underlines the potential impact of news media and information sources that report on online hate and calls for further investigation into the role of polarized communication networks and news media.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.398
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4655–4666
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.398
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.398
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Claire Seungeun Lee, Bogang Jun, and Yong-Yeol Ahn. 2021. Predicting Anti-Asian Hateful Users on Twitter during COVID-19. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 4655–4666, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicting Anti-Asian Hateful Users on Twitter during COVID-19 (An et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.398.pdf
Software:
 2021.findings-emnlp.398.Software.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.398.mp4
Code
 anjisun221/anti-asian-slurs
Data
Hate Speech