ArticleScience advances2021
Meaningful messaging: Sentiment in elite social media communication with the public on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
- Highly engaging events reveal semantic and temporal compression in online community discourse.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Public Health Messaging on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Observational Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Observational
- Echoes of authenticity: Reclaiming human sentiment in the large language model era.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Public Opinion About COVID-19 on a Microblog Platform in China: Topic Modeling and Multidimensional Sentiment Analysis of Social Media.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Article
- Examining Rural and Urban Sentiment Difference in COVID-19-Related Topics on Twitter: Word Embedding-Based Retrospective Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Open Debates Conducive for Vaccination Rate Flatlines: A Scoping Review and Convergent Cross Mapping.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Elite messaging plays a crucial role in shaping public debate and spreading information. We examine elite political communication during an emergent international crisis to investigate the role of tone in messaging, information spread, and public reaction. By measuring tone in social media messages from members of the U.S. Congress related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we find clear partisan differences and a differential impact of tone on message engagement and information spread. This suggests that even in the midst of an international health crisis, partisanship and emotional rhetoric play a critical part in elite communications and contribute to the attention messages receive. The messaging on COVID-19 is polarized and fractured. The valenced messaging provokes divergence in public engagement, reaction, and information spread. These results have important implications for studies of representation, public opinion, and how government can effectively engage individuals in emergent situations or pivotal moments.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.