Exploration of COVID-19 Discourse on Twitter: American Politician Edition
This work addresses the problem of understanding political polarization in social media during crises for researchers and policymakers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study analyzed tweets from American politicians to explore partisan differences in COVID-19 discourse, finding that Democrats focused more on casualties and medical advice while Republicans emphasized political responsibilities and media updates.
The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly affected the political scene worldwide and the introduction of new terminology and public opinions regarding the virus has further polarized partisan stances. Using a collection of tweets gathered from leading American political figures online (Republican and Democratic), we explored the partisan differences in approach, response, and attitude towards handling the international crisis. Implementation of the bag-of-words, bigram, and TF-IDF models was used to identify and analyze keywords, topics, and overall sentiments from each party. Results suggest that Democrats are more concerned with the casualties of the pandemic, and give more medical precautions and recommendations to the public whereas Republicans are more invested in political responsibilities such as keeping the public updated through media and carefully watching the progress of the virus. We propose a systematic approach to predict and distinguish a tweet's political stance (left or right leaning) based on its COVID-19 related terms using different classification algorithms on different language models.