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Virulence of Two Infectious Diseases: Inequality and Covid-19

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Research and Innovation Forum 2021 (RIIFORUM 2021)

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Complexity ((SPCOM))

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Abstract

After the Covid-19 outbreak and the killing of the African American George Floyd, people’s attention focused again on topics such as racism and police violence, as well as socio-economic inequalities in society, from access to healthcare to work and education. The video of Floyd’s death was captured by a passer-by and went viral on social media. Soon different social actors such as citizens, politicians, activists, celebrities and athletes started to use social media to express their opinions and grief. Against this backdrop, this paper aims at exploring the netizens’ perspectives and sentiments towards police and racial issues on Twitter via Big Data Textual Analysis through R software. Specifically, we scraped a set of 1.4kk geocoded tweets in the United States. Text Mining tools, such as Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis, were applied to gain valuable data insights. Results suggests that the conversation about George Floyd revolves around the strong condemnation of this murder and the revitalization of the #BlackLivesMatter.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Francesco Smaldone, Mario D’Arco & Marco Pellicano

  2. University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy

    Vittoria Marino

Authors
  1. Francesco Smaldone
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  2. Mario D’Arco
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  3. Vittoria Marino
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  4. Marco Pellicano
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francesco Smaldone .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Warsaw, Poland

    Anna Visvizi

  2. University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Orlando Troisi

  3. King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

    Kawther Saeedi

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Smaldone, F., D’Arco, M., Marino, V., Pellicano, M. (2021). Virulence of Two Infectious Diseases: Inequality and Covid-19. In: Visvizi, A., Troisi, O., Saeedi, K. (eds) Research and Innovation Forum 2021. RIIFORUM 2021. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84311-3_46

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