Fine-Grained Analysis of the Use of Neutral and Controversial Terms for COVID-19 on Social Media

During the COVID-19 pandemic, ‘Chinese Virus’ emerged as a controversial term for coronavirus. To some, it may seem like a neutral term referring to the physical origin of the virus. To many others, however, the term is in fact attaching ethnicity to the virus. While both arguments have justifications of their own, quantitative analysis of how these terms are being used in real life is lacking. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap with fine-grained analysis. We find that tweets with a controversial term can be easily distinguished from those with neutral terms using state-of-the-art classifiers, that they cover different substantive topics, and that they possess different linguistic features reflecting sentiment and psychological states. All evidence suggests that the real life use of the controversial terms is distinctively different from that of the neutral terms.