COVID-19's impact has surpassed from personal and global health to our social life In terms of digital presence, it is speculated that during pandemic, there has been a significant rise in cyberbullying In this paper, we have examined the hypothesis of whether cyberbullying and reporting of such incidents have increased in recent times To evaluate the speculations, we collected cyberbullying related public tweets (N = 454, 046) posted between January 1st, 2020 - June 7th, 2020 A simple visual frequentist analysis ignores serial correlation and does not depict changepoints as such To address correlation and a relatively small number of time points, Bayesian estimation of the trends is proposed for the collected data via an autoregressive Poisson model We show that this new Bayesian method detailed in this paper can clearly show the upward trend on cyberbullying-relatedtweets since mid-March 2020 However, this evidence itself does not signify a rise in cyberbullyingbut shows a correlation of the crisis with the discussion of such incidents by individuals Our work emphasizes a critical issue of cyberbullying and how a global crisis impacts social media abuse and provides a trend analysis model that can be utilized for social media data analysis in general © 2020 ACM
Evaluating the Impact of COVID-19 on Cyberbullying through Bayesian Trend Analysis