# Religion and Spirituality on Social Media in the Aftermath of the Global Pandemic

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11121 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11121/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [The Pushshift Reddit Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08435/) (2020)
- [RedditBias: A Real-World Resource for Bias Evaluation and Debiasing of Conversational Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03521/) (2021)
- [Self-training Improves Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02194/) (2020)
- [Analyzing Information Leakage of Updates to Natural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07942/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Implicit Gender Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08361/) (2020)
- [Exploring Bayesian Deep Learning for Urgent Instructor Intervention Need in MOOC Forums](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12643/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Church closed its physical doors for the first time in about 800 years, which is, arguably, a cataclysmic event. Other religions have found themselves in a similar situation, and they were practically forced to move online, which is an unprecedented occasion. In this paper, we analyse this sudden change in religious activities twofold: we create and deliver a questionnaire, as well as analyse Twitter data, to understand people's perceptions and activities related to religious activities online. Importantly, we also analyse the temporal variations in this process by analysing a period of 3 months: July-September 2020. Additionally to the separate analysis of the two data sources, we also discuss the implications from triangulating the results.