Framing COVID-19: How we conceptualize and discuss the pandemic on Twitter.

ABSTRACT: Doctors and nurses in these weeks and months are busy in the trenches, fighting against a new invisible enemy: Covid-19. Cities are locked down and civilians are besieged in their own homes, to prevent the spreading of the virus. War-related terminology is commonly used to frame the discourse around epidemics and diseases. The discourse around the current epidemic makes use of war-related metaphors too, not only in public discourse and in the media, but also in the tweets written by non-experts of mass communication. We hereby present an analysis of the discourse around #Covid-19, based on a large corpus tweets posted on Twitter during March and April 2020. Using topic modelling we first analyze the topics around which the discourse can be classified. Then, we show that the WAR framing is

SUBMITTER: Wicke P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7526906 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature