Related papers: MP Twitter Abuse in the Age of COVID-19: White Pap…

The UK has had a volatile political environment for some years now, with Brexit and leadership crises marking the past five years. With this work, we wanted to understand more about how the global health emergency, COVID-19, influences the…

COVID-19 has given rise to malicious content online, including online abuse and hate toward British MPs. In order to understand and contextualise the level of abuse MPs receive, we consider how ministers use social media to communicate…

Timely access to accurate information is crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prompted by key stakeholders' cautioning against an "infodemic", we study information sharing on Twitter from January through May 2020. We observe an overall…

Purpose: Public attitudes towards COVID-19 and social distancing are critical in reducing its spread. It is therefore important to understand public reactions and information dissemination in all major forms, including on social media. This…

COVID-19 represents the most severe global crisis to date whose public conversation can be studied in real time. To do so, we use a data set of over 350 million tweets and retweets posted by over 26 million English speaking Twitter users…

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a bulk of scientific research and related Twitter discussions. To unravel the public concerns about the COVID-19 crisis reflected in the science-based Twitter conversations, this…

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, users are increasingly turning to online services. An increase in social media usage has also been observed, leading to the suspicion that this has also raised cyberbullying. In this initial work, we explore…

Concerns have reached the mainstream about how social media are affecting political outcomes. One trajectory for this is the exposure of politicians to online abuse. In this paper we use 1.4 million tweets from the months before the 2015…

The 2019 UK general election took place against a background of rising online hostility levels toward politicians and concerns about its impact on democracy. We collected 4.2 million tweets sent to or from election candidates in the six…

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has significantly altered our lifestyles as we resort to minimize the spread through preventive measures such as social distancing and quarantine. An increasingly worrying aspect is the gap between the…

At the start of 2020, COVID-19 became the most urgent threat to global public health. Uniquely in recent times, governments have imposed partly voluntary, partly compulsory restrictions on the population to slow the spread of the virus. In…

The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has greatly influenced people's daily lives across the globe. Emergent measures and policies (e.g., lockdown, social distancing) have been taken by governments to combat this highly…

There has been a huge spike in the usage of social media platforms during the COVID-19 lockdowns. These lockdown periods have resulted in a set of new cybercrimes, thereby allowing attackers to victimise social media users with a range of…

COVID-19's impact has surpassed from personal and global health to our social life. In terms of digital presence, it is speculated that during pandemic, there has been a significant rise in cyberbullying. In this paper, we have examined the…

COVID-19 has brought about many changes in social dynamics. Stay-at-home orders and disruptions in school teaching can influence bullying behavior in-person and online, both of which leading to negative outcomes in victims. To study…

News creation and consumption has been changing since the advent of social media. An estimated 2.95 billion people in 2019 used social media worldwide. The widespread of the Coronavirus COVID-19 resulted with a tsunami of social media. Most…

We extend previous work about general election-related abuse of UK MPs with two new time periods, one in late 2018 and the other in early 2019, allowing previous observations to be extended to new data and the impact of key stages in the UK…

The COVID-19 pandemic has been affecting the world dramatically ever since 2020. The minimum availability of physical interactions during the lockdown has caused more and more people to turn to online activities on social media platforms.…

The spread of misinformation, conspiracy, and questionable content and information manipulation by foreign adversaries on social media has surged along with the COVID-19 pandemic. Such malicious cyber-enabled actions may cause increasing…

The COVID-19 pandemic has created many problems, especially in people's social lives. There has been increasing isolation and economic hardships since the beginning of the pandemic for people all over the world. Quarantines and lockdowns…