Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
School of Journalism and Communication, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100084, China.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Nov 23;17(22):8701. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17228701.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when individuals were confronted with social distancing, social media served as a significant platform for expressing feelings and seeking emotional support. However, a group of automated actors known as social bots have been found to coexist with human users in discussions regarding the coronavirus crisis, which may pose threats to public health. To figure out how these actors distorted public opinion and sentiment expressions in the outbreak, this study selected three critical timepoints in the development of the pandemic and conducted a topic-based sentiment analysis for bot-generated and human-generated tweets. The findings show that suspected social bots contributed to as much as 9.27% of COVID-19 discussions on Twitter. Social bots and humans shared a similar trend on sentiment polarity-positive or negative-for almost all topics. For the most negative topics, social bots were even more negative than humans. Their sentiment expressions were weaker than those of humans for most topics, except for COVID-19 in the US and the healthcare system. In most cases, social bots were more likely to actively amplify humans' emotions, rather than to trigger humans' amplification. In discussions of COVID-19 in the US, social bots managed to trigger bot-to-human anger transmission. Although these automated accounts expressed more sadness towards health risks, they failed to pass sadness to humans.
在 COVID-19 大流行期间，当人们面临社交距离时，社交媒体成为表达情感和寻求情感支持的重要平台。然而，研究发现，在讨论冠状病毒危机时，一群被称为社交机器人的自动化参与者与人类用户共存，这可能对公共卫生构成威胁。为了弄清楚这些参与者如何在疫情期间扭曲公众舆论和情感表达，本研究在疫情发展的三个关键时间点选择了三个主题，并对机器人生成和人类生成的推文进行了主题情感分析。研究结果表明，在 Twitter 上，疑似社交机器人对 COVID-19 讨论的贡献高达 9.27%。社交机器人和人类在几乎所有主题上的情感极性（积极或消极）都呈现出相似的趋势。对于最负面的主题，社交机器人的负面情绪甚至比人类更强烈。除了美国的 COVID-19 和医疗保健系统，社交机器人在大多数主题上的情绪表达都弱于人类。在大多数情况下，社交机器人更有可能主动放大人类的情绪，而不是引发人类的放大。在关于美国 COVID-19 的讨论中，社交机器人成功地引发了机器人到人类的愤怒传递。尽管这些自动化账户对健康风险表示出更多的悲伤，但它们未能将悲伤传递给人类。
