Political Partisanship and Antiscience Attitudes in Online Discussions About COVID-19: Twitter Content Analysis.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The novel coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage communities across the United States. Opinion surveys identified the importance of political ideology in shaping perceptions of the pandemic and compliance with preventive measures.

Objective

The aim of this study was to measure political partisanship and antiscience attitudes in the discussions about the pandemic on social media, as well as their geographic and temporal distributions.

Methods

We analyzed a large set of tweets from Twitter related to the pandemic, collected between January and May 2020, and developed methods to classify the ideological alignment of users along the moderacy (hardline vs moderate), political (liberal vs conservative), and science (antiscience vs proscience) dimensions.

Res

SUBMITTER: Rao A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8204937 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature