Analysis of cyberbullying tweets in trending world events

Abstract

The use of social media amongst children, adolescents and families is nowadays a common practise in our everyday lives. Social networking sites allow social interaction between people through various channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs. Even if this interaction is generally healthy, these sites bring several risks, such as cyberbullying, depression and exposure of inappropriate content. In this paper we tackle the problem of cyberbullying via a novel approach that analyses online posts in trending world events. These generally cause a lot of interest and controversy among online Web users. Twitter is the social network of choice, where a large dataset of tweets is collected. The two current world events selected are the Ebola virus outbreak in Africa and the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Collected tweets are carefully analysed to identify the most popular hashtags and named entities used within cyberbullying tweets. This analysis provides a basis towards several useful applications, such as a cyberbullying online post detector for certain current trending world events. This will help reduce the number of cyberbullying cases in social networking sites. Results obtained from this evaluation can be applied to other cyberbullying scenarios.