COVID-19: the emoji density (average number of emojis per tweet) and the relative popularity of specific emojis have changed

How has the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic affected global emoji usage? Anwesha Das. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, Dec 14 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2020.1838383

Abstract: Over the past few decades, emojis have emerged as a popular form of non-linguistic expression in computer-mediated communication. Various factors have been known to affect emoji usage patterns (such as age, gender, platform diversity etc.). The aim of the current study is to explore if the onset of the coronavirus pandemic (2019–20) has affected emoji usage patterns across various countries. The present study was conducted on two sets of tweets, collected before (July, 2019) and during the pandemic (March, 2020). The results suggest that although the usage of specific emojis has not changed noticeably (that is, the popular emojis mostly remained the same), the emoji density (average number of emojis per tweet) and the relative popularity of specific emojis have changed. This could potentially point toward a sense of insufficiency of emojis to express the sentiments associated with the pandemic.

Discussions and conclusions

Emoji usage and their patterns can provide significant insight into human behavior in CMC. In addition, the scope of understanding the different factors affecting emoji usage is vast.

In the present work, emoji usage was compared between two datasets (one collected before and the other after the start of the pandemic), and different characteristic parameters were explored for the purpose of this comparison.

Current results do not show any significant shift in the use of the popular emojis before and after the start of pandemic. It was observed that across all four country-clusters, the most popular emojis more or less remained the same. In addition to this, no emoji that can be associated with the pandemic was present in the top 10 emojis used for each cluster, suggesting that on a general scale, the pandemic does not seem to have altered the most commonly used emojis. Further, the average sentiment score of the emojis used (by country-cluster, for the top 5 emojis) remained approximately the same before and after the start of the pandemic.

However, an interesting point to note here is that across the first three clusters (with the maximum number of COVID-19 patients), the relative popularity of some of the most popular emojis dropped after the start of the pandemic. For example, in cluster 1, the “tears of joy emoji” (the most popular emoji across all clusters), made up 34.36% of all the emojis used, whereas after the start of the pandemic, it made up only 14.69%. A similar pattern is seen in cluster 2 as well, where initially the “tears of joy” emoji makes up 17.72% of all emojis, whereas it makes up only 5.00% after the start of the pandemic. In cluster 3, the values are 7.46 and 4.59 before and after the start of the pandemic, respectively, that is the difference closes in. In cluster 4, this difference almost levels out. A similar pattern is also observed amongst a few of the other top 5 emojis. As mentioned earlier in this paper, the emoji usage density dropped for 75% of the countries (by approximately 40%) in the first three clusters. Hence, indicating that the average usage of emojis by countries which are most affected by the pandemic dropped.

Although this difference is subtle, this could potentially indicate toward a shift in general public sentiment—a possible explanation being that there is a sense of insufficiency in emojis being able to convey the emotions associated with the pandemic. Another explanation could be that people associate emojis to a (comparatively) lighthearted conversation (Danesi, 2016), whereas the pandemic calls for more serious expressions, where emojis may be inadequate.

Nevertheless, it is important to mention here that a number of other factors could possibly affect global emoji usage and emoji usage amongst country-clusters (say clusters having countries with vastly differing economies etc.). The current study aimed to look at only one such possible factor, namely, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.