How Do Chinese People View Cyberbullying? A Text Analysis Based on Social Media

Shan Lu, Lingbo Zhao, Lizu Lai, Congrong Shi and Wanyue Jiang
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Shan Lu: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430056, China
Lingbo Zhao: Department of Applied Psychology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350108, China
Lizu Lai: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430056, China
Congrong Shi: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430056, China
Wanyue Jiang: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430056, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 3, 1-13

Abstract: The rise of cyberbullying has been of great concern for the general public. This study aims to explore public attitudes towards cyberbullying on Chinese social media. Cognition and emotion are important components of attitude, and this study innovatively used text analysis to extract the cognition and emotion of the posts. We used a web crawler to collect 53,526 posts related to cyberbullying in Chinese on Sina Weibo in a month, where emotions were detected using the software “Text Mind”, a Chinese linguistic psychological text analysis system, and the content analysis was performed using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model. Sentiment analysis showed the frequency of negative emotion words was the highest in the posts; the frequency of anger, anxiety, and sadness words decreased in turn. The topic model analysis identified three common topics about cyberbullying: critiques on cyberbullying and support for its victims, rational expressions of anger and celebrity worship, and calls for further control. In summary, this study quantitatively reveals the negative attitudes of the Chinese public toward cyberbullying and conveys specific public concerns via three common topics. This will help us to better understand the demands of the Chinese public so that targeted support can be proposed to curb cyberbullying.

Keywords: cyberbullying; attitude; topic model; sentiment analysis; social media; text analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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