  With the world-wide development of 2019 novel coronavirus, although WHO has
officially announced the disease as COVID-19, one controversial term - "Chinese
Virus" is still being used by a great number of people. In the meantime, global
online media coverage about COVID-19-related racial attacks increases steadily,
most of which are anti-Chinese or anti-Asian. As this pandemic becomes
increasingly severe, more people start to talk about it on social media
platforms such as Twitter. When they refer to COVID-19, there are mainly two
ways: using controversial terms like "Chinese Virus" or "Wuhan Virus", or using
non-controversial terms like "Coronavirus". In this study, we attempt to
characterize the Twitter users who use controversial terms and those who use
non-controversial terms. We use the Tweepy API to retrieve 17 million related
tweets and the information of their authors. We find significant differences
between these two groups of Twitter users across their demographics, user-level
features like the number of followers, political following status, as well as
their geo-locations. Moreover, we apply classification models to predict
Twitter users who are more likely to use controversial terms. To our best
knowledge, this is the first large-scale social media-based study to
characterize users with respect to their usage of controversial terms during a
major crisis.
