The Burden of Being a Bridge: Analysing Subjective Well-Being of Twitter Users During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ninghan Chen, Xihui Chen, Zhiqiang Zhong, Jun Pang

ECML-PKDD 2022 pp. 241-257

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-26390-3_15 /ecmlpkdd/2022/chen2022ecmlpkdd-burden/

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic triggers infodemic over online social media, which significantly impacts public health around the world, both physically and psychologically. In this paper, we study the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of influential social media users, whose sharing behaviours significantly promote the diffusion of COVID-19 related information. Specifically, we focus on subjective well-being (SWB), and analyse whether SWB changes have a relationship with their bridging performance in information diffusion, which measures the speed and wideness gain of information transmission due to their sharing. We accurately capture users' bridging performance by proposing a new measurement. Benefiting from deep-learning natural language processing models, we quantify social media users' SWB from their textual posts. With the data collected from Twitter for almost two years, we reveal the greater mental suffering of influential users during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through comprehensive hierarchical multiple regression analysis, we are the first to discover the strong relationship between social users' SWB and their bridging performance.

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Cite

Text

Chen et al. "The Burden of Being a Bridge: Analysing Subjective Well-Being of Twitter Users During the COVID-19 Pandemic." European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, 2022. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-26390-3_15

Markdown

[Chen et al. "The Burden of Being a Bridge: Analysing Subjective Well-Being of Twitter Users During the COVID-19 Pandemic." European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, 2022.](https://mlanthology.org/ecmlpkdd/2022/chen2022ecmlpkdd-burden/) doi:10.1007/978-3-031-26390-3_15

BibTeX

@inproceedings{chen2022ecmlpkdd-burden,
  title     = {{The Burden of Being a Bridge: Analysing Subjective Well-Being of Twitter Users During the COVID-19 Pandemic}},
  author    = {Chen, Ninghan and Chen, Xihui and Zhong, Zhiqiang and Pang, Jun},
  booktitle = {European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases},
  year      = {2022},
  pages     = {241-257},
  doi       = {10.1007/978-3-031-26390-3_15},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/ecmlpkdd/2022/chen2022ecmlpkdd-burden/}
}