Vindication, virtue, and vitriol
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Vindication, virtue, and vitriol A study of online engagement and abuse toward British MPs during the COVID-19 pandemic Tracie Farrell1 · Genevieve Gorrell1 · Kalina Bontcheva1 Received: 21 July 2020 / Accepted: 11 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract COVID-19 has given rise to a lot of malicious content online, including hate speech, online abuse, and misinformation. British MPs have also received abuse and hate on social media during this time. To understand and contextualise the level of abuse MPs receive, we consider how ministers use social media to communicate about the pandemic, and the citizen engagement that this generates. The focus of the paper is on a large-scale, mixed-methods study of abusive and antagonistic responses to UK politicians on Twitter, during the pandemic from early February to late May 2020. We find that pressing subjects such as financial concerns attract high levels of engagement, but not necessarily abusive dialogue. Rather, criticising authorities appears to attract higher levels of abuse during this period of the pandemic. In addition, communicating about subjects like racism and inequality may result in accusations of virtue signalling or pandering by some users. This work contributes to the wider understanding of abusive language online, in particular that which is directed at public officials. Keywords Online hate · Abusive speech · Natural language processing · Politics · COVID-19 · Twitter
* Tracie Farrell [email protected] Genevieve Gorrell [email protected] Kalina Bontcheva [email protected] 1
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Computational Social Science
Introduction Social media can offer a “temperature check” on which topics and issues are trending for certain cross-sections of the public, and how they feel about them [21]. This temperature has run high during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a number of incendiary and misleading claims [16], as well as hateful and abusive content [68] appearing online. This content can interfere with both government and public responses to the pandemic. A recent survey of coronavirus conspiracy beliefs in England, for example, demonstrated that belief in conspiracy was associated with lower compliance with government guidelines. Moreover, the authors found that 1 in 5 of their participants had a strong endorsement of conspiracy thinking [25], indicating that this is not just a fringe issue. Online verbal abuse contributes as well, being both cause and consequence of misinformation: the quality of information and debate is damaged as certain voices are silenced/driven out of the space,1 and escalation leads to angry and aggressive expressions [60]. Understanding the interplay between malicious online content and the public’s relationships with authorities during a health crisis is necessary for an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scope This work charts Twitter abuse in replies to UK MPs from before the start of the pandemic in the UK, in early
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