Hate and abuse toward British MPs during COVID-19

The following database (COVIDAbusePublic) is supplementary material for our study on hate and abusive language directed at British MPs during the COVID-19 pandemic. That larger study spanned early February (at the start of the pandemic in Europe) to late May, as lockdowns were just starting to ease.

It is a sample of  190 tweets that we captured that attracted at least 20 abusive replies, and where this accounts for more than 8% of the total replies.

For each tweet, we have provided a set of qualitative annotations that describe the typology and topology of MPs' tweets, according to a handcrafted scheme. In the dataset, we have provided an "Annotation Notes -Memos" column, in which it is described how the researcher arrived at that annotation. This is intended to support social science on large scale datasets, to improve rigour and provide future researchers with a roadmap for understanding our analysis.

Download the COVIDAbusePublic dataset (XLSX, 273KB)

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