JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The novel coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage communities across the US. Opinion surveys identified 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 anti-science attitudes in the discussions about the pandemic on social media, as well as their geographic and temporal distribution.

Methods:

We analyze a large set of tweets related to the pandemic collected between January and May of 2020 and develop methods to classify the ideological alignment of users along the moderacy (hardline vs moderate), political (liberal vs conservative) and science (anti-science vs pro-science) dimensions.

Results:

We find that polarization along the science and political dimensions are correlated. Moreover, politically moderate users are more aligned with the pro-science views, while hardline users are more aligned with anti-science views. Contrary to expectations, we do not find that polarization grows over time; instead, we see increasing activity by moderate pro-science users. We also show that anti-science conservatives tend to tweet from the Southern and Northwestern US, while anti-science moderates from the Western states. The proportion of anti-science conservatives are found to correlate with COVID-19 cases.

Conclusions:

Our findings shed light on the multi-dimensional nature of polarization, and the feasibility of tracking polarized opinions about the pandemic across time and space through social media data.