In the Eyes of the Beholder: Sentiment and Topic Analyses on Social Media Use of Neutral and Controversial Terms for COVID-19

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. In this paper, we attempt to shed light on the term's real-world usage on Twitter. Using sentiment feature analysis and topic modeling, we reveal substantial differences between the use of the controversial terms such as "Chinese virus" and that of the non-controversial terms such as "COVID-19". For example, tweets using controversial terms contain a higher percentage of anger as well as negative emotions. They also point to China more frequently. Our results suggest that while the term "Chinese virus" could be interpreted either as neutral or racist, its usage on social media leans strongly towards the latter.