The National Science Foundation’s Division of Social and Economic Sciences awarded $196,890 to Mississippi State University to fund the creation of an AI-based database analyzing how people used social media to discuss Covid-19.
The program, titled “RAPID: Analyses of Emotions Expressed in Social Media and Forums During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” included funding from the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act and was tasked with establishing a “database” of “location- and time-linked record of emotions that may be associated with increased vulnerability to virtual threats” and “answer[ing] fundamental research questions about the linkages of negative emotions experienced during the pandemic with regional variation and socioeconomic status.”
NSF Award Search_ Award # 2… by The Federalist
“The data will permit analyses of risks such as sharing of more personal information online, misinformation initiation and spread, relaxed security preferences, and insider threat,” reads the award’s abstract.
The program is meant to “advance[] science by informing community response and policymaking during pandemics through an analysis and understanding of how emotions are linked to local and regional social and geographic” factors.
“Artificial intelligence and data science techniques” were used to process and analyze the nearly 15,000,000 collected social media posts.
The researchers collected data from “10-15 social media and web-based forums” from December 2019 to December 2020, starting with discourse about the Chinese government’s early handling of Covid.
Posts were gathered from mainstream, albeit biased and predominantly leftwing, platforms like YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, pre-Musk Twitter, and visual media hosting site Flickr; the conservative
