ArticleJournal of medical Internet research2021
Political Partisanship and Antiscience Attitudes in Online Discussions About COVID-19: Twitter Content Analysis.
Article in Journal of medical Internet research, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Drivers of health polarization during the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review.Science advances · 2025Pooled it
- Regional and temporal patterns of partisan polarization during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and Canada.PloS one · 2026Article
- Public Health Messaging on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Observational Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Observational
- The Impact of Comment Slant and Comment Tone on Digital Health Communication Among Polarized Publics: A Web-Based Survey Experiment.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Article
- Scenario-Based Messages on Social Media Motivate COVID-19 Information Seeking.Journal of applied research in memory and cognition · 2024Article
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- Staying Home, Tweeting Hope: Mixed Methods Study of Twitter Sentiment Geographical Index During US Stay-At-Home Orders.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Anti-intellectualism amid the COVID-19 pandemic: The discursive elements and sources of anti-Fauci tweets.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2023Article
- Scaling up the discovery of hesitancy profiles by identifying the framing of beliefs towards vaccine confidence in Twitter discourse.Journal of behavioral medicine · 2023Article
- A scoping review on the use of natural language processing in research on political polarization: trends and research prospects.Journal of computational social science · 2023Article
- Can the Content of Social Networks Explain Epidemic Outbreaks?Population research and policy review · 2023Article
- How does Twitter account moderation work? Dynamics of account creation and suspension on Twitter during major geopolitical events.EPJ data science · 2023Article
- Using geospatial social media data for infectious disease studies: a systematic review.International journal of digital earth · 2023Article
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- Partisan asymmetries in exposure to misinformation.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Perceived risk, political polarization, and the willingness to follow COVID-19 mitigation guidelines.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2022Article
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- Article
- Who polarizes Twitter? Ideological polarization, partisan groups and strategic networked campaigning on Twitter during the 2017 and 2021 German Federal elections 'Bundestagswahlen'.Social network analysis and mining · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe 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.
objectiveThe 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.
methodsWe 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.
resultsWe found a significant correlation in polarized views along the science and political dimensions. Moreover, politically moderate users were more aligned with proscience views, while hardline users were more aligned with antiscience views. Contrary to expectations, we did not find that polarization grew over time; instead, we saw increasing activity by moderate proscience users. We also show that antiscience conservatives in the United States tended to tweet from the southern and northwestern states, while antiscience moderates tended to tweet from the western states. The proportion of antiscience conservatives was found to correlate with COVID-19 cases.
conclusionsOur findings shed light on the multidimensional nature of polarization and the feasibility of tracking polarized opinions about the pandemic across time and space through social media data.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.