Family-Related Language in Bullying Discourse on Reddit before and after the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Analysis of Online Narratives

This study aims to analyze how family-related language in online bullying discourse changed from before to after the COVID-19 pandemic. We assess the semantic similarity of familial terms (such as "parent," "child," "sister," and "brother") to the word "bullying," and the emotions expressed in sentences containing these terms, before and after the pandemic. We obtained 8,720 posts on subreddit r/Bullying between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2022. Using a word embedding technique, we extracted keywords similar to "bullying" each period and compared them with a focus on familial terms, and we classified the emotions of family-mentioning sentences using a pretrained classifier. We identified four keywords ("child," "niece," "sister," and "parent") that were semantically similar to "bullying" before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. After the pandemic, a larger set of family terms (son, sister, brother, child, cousin, daughter, and parents) appeared among these keywords, although only some of them were retrieved consistently across repeated model estimations with different random seeds. Emotion differences were smaller and less consistent, with only three terms showing changes that survived correction for multiple comparisons. Because co-occurrence of family terms with bullying language cannot separate posts describing bullying by a family member from posts in which family members appear as supporters or advice-seekers, we treat these results as evidence about family-related language within bullying discourse rather than about the incidence of family bullying. The findings are consistent with, but do not distinguish between, a change in family dynamics during the pandemic and an increased willingness to disclose family experiences online. They suggest that platforms hosting anti-bullying discussion may benefit from surfacing family violence resources when family terms co-occur with bullying language.