Political Framing: US COVID19 Blame Game
This study addresses how political framing shapes public discourse on social media, specifically for researchers and policymakers analyzing polarization and misinformation, but it is incremental as it applies existing framing concepts to new data.
The paper analyzed political framing on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that rhetoric was dominated by blame frames (targeting Trump, China, or conspiracies) and support frames (backing candidates) rather than public health perspectives, with divergences between Republican and Democratic users in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential campaign.
Through the use of Twitter, framing has become a prominent presidential campaign tool for politically active users. Framing is used to influence thoughts by evoking a particular perspective on an event. In this paper, we show that the COVID19 pandemic rather than being viewed as a public health issue, political rhetoric surrounding it is mostly shaped through a blame frame (blame Trump, China, or conspiracies) and a support frame (support candidates) backing the agenda of Republican and Democratic users in the lead up to the 2020 presidential campaign. We elucidate the divergences between supporters of both parties on Twitter via the use of frames. Additionally, we show how framing is used to positively or negatively reinforce users' thoughts. We look at how Twitter can efficiently be used to identify frames for topics through a reproducible pipeline.