Role of Emotion in Excessive Use of Twitter During COVID-19 Imposed Lockdown in India
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Role of Emotion in Excessive Use of Twitter During COVID-19 Imposed Lockdown in India Anshika Arora 1
&
Pinaki Chakraborty 1 & M. P. S. Bhatia 1 & Prabhat Mittal 2
Received: 13 July 2020 / Revised: 26 September 2020 / Accepted: 9 October 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns to contain it are affecting the daily life of people around the world. People are now using digital technologies, including social media, more than ever before. The objectives of this study were to analyze the social media usage pattern of people during the COVID-19 imposed lockdown and to understand the effects of emotion on the same. We scraped messages posted on Twitter by users from India expressing their emotion or view on the pandemic during the first 40 days of the lockdown. We identified the users who posted frequently and analyzed their usage pattern and their overall emotion during the study period based on their tweets. It was observed that 222 users tweeted frequently during the study period. Out of them, 13.5% were found to be addicted to Twitter and posted 13.67 tweets daily on an average (SD: 4.89), while 3.2% were found to be highly addicted and posted 40.71 tweets daily on an average (SD: 9.90) during the study period. The overall emotion of 40.1% of the users was happiness throughout the study period. However, it was also observed that users who tweeted more frequently were typically angry, disgusted, or sad about the prevailing situation. We concluded that people with a negative sentiment are more susceptible to addictive use of social media. Keywords COVID-19 . Lockdown . Social media addiction . Emotion analysis . Twitter
Introduction Social networking sites were developed in the early-2000s and more than 3 billion people use these websites now. The users of the social networking sites are from different age groups, countries, and professions. They use social media for different purposes including keeping in touch with family and friends, entertainment, and professional reasons. Although social media can be beneficial in many ways, an excessive use of the same may be detrimental to mental health of users. When people spend significant amounts of time using social media developing dependency on the social networking sites for social interaction, communication, entertainment, and emotion expression, it leads to negative outcomes including problematic and addictive behaviors (Arora et al. 2020). According to
* Anshika Arora [email protected] 1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Netaji Subhas University of Technology, New Delhi 110078, India
2
Department of Commerce, Satyawati College (Evening), University of Delhi, Delhi 110052, India
researchers (Ge et al. 2015), through spending a lot of time in social media for communication, entertainment, and information, people relieve their ill emotions and develop a compulsive addiction to internet. Researchers have studied the causes of social media addiction and the types of users who are more s
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