“Amusing ourselves to death”: Mechanisms in cyberbullying prompted by rumors and denigration amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in China

The use of rumors and denigration in cyberbullying have been studied in the contexts of public opinion and public policy, but questions remain. The study presented here examines the association of rumors and denigration with cyberbullying during the COVID-19 pandemic and provides a sentiment evolution and social network map of cyberbullying features at different stages of an episode. This study applied latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling, sentiment analysis and semantic network analysis to analyze three Chinese cases where rumors and denigration triggered cyberbullying, with 7691 comments. The authors found that cyberbullying caused by rumors and denigration often started with the release of fake information, and core topics and sentiment values varied between stages of the cyberbullying episode. Collective moral disengagement theory suggests collective behavior may reduce moral self-control, generating online interactive behaviors that enhance the spread of rumors and denigration. Spiral of silence theory also offers perspectives on cyberbullying, which are considered in this study. While the cases in this study occurred within the context of COVID-19, cyberbullying via rumor and denigration may occur in many scenarios, so the current paper will interest multiple audiences. The findings of this study suggest that researchers and decision-makers could helpfully design programs to supervise public opinion, raise awareness of cyberbullying and avoid secondary harms.