Change-Point Analysis of Cyberbullying-Related Twitter Discussions During COVID-19

Abstract: Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, users are increasingly turning to online services. An increase in social media usage has also been observed, leading to the suspicion that this has also raised cyberbullying. In this initial work, we explore the possibility of an increase in cyberbullying incidents due to the pandemic and high social media usage. To evaluate this trend, we collected 454,046 cyberbullying-related public tweets posted between January 1st, 2020 -- June 7th, 2020. We summarize the tweets containing multiple keywords into their daily counts. Our analysis showed the existence of at most one statistically significant changepoint for most of these keywords, which were primarily located around the end of March. Almost all these changepoint time-locations can be attributed to COVID-19, which substantiates our initial hypothesis of an increase in cyberbullying through analysis of discussions over Twitter.