Curators of Information and Outrage: Elite Behavior during the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Digital Populism in the Wake of the Pandemic

Abstract

Social media platforms have been accused of cheapening political communication by rewarding emotional, non-substantive, and unserious content. But while political accounts receive some attention when their posts are inflammatory - or when they contain misinformation and conspiracy theories - the "editorial choices" behind regular and uncontroversial posts remain largely unexamined. Moreover, Twitter-based studies capture only a subset of the messages produced by politicians for their constituents and potential supporters. Analyzing over 400,000 Facebook posts from U.S. legislators (and a subset of Instagram accounts) with semi-supervised methods, this paper documents that a non-trivial proportion of posts from the members of Congress is devoted to citizens' tangible concerns. Politicians devote some proportion of their digital real estate to informing the public, even when they do so selectively and in a strategic manner.

However, some candidates for political office fuel conflict centered on identity rather than ideological disagreement. Consistent with the theory that conservative or right-leaning politicians are more likely to cater to nationalistic and racial attitudes, the results show that posts about public health exploited anti-foreign sentiment, especially among
Republican legislators during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between January and March 2020, the number of Facebook posts explicitly mentioning China more than doubled among Republicans but remained stable among Democratic members of Congress. A subset of Facebook posts about China contained topics and language bordering on misinformation and prejudice.

The paper concludes that, in spite of notable exceptions, political candidates typically choose to speak about unobjectionable topics, in spite of perverse incentives to stir conflict online. Although democratic norms in the United States have deteriorated in recent years according to some measures, non-democratic or anti-democratic content on legislators' social media channels remains extremely rare.

Author

• Jan Zilinsky, Technical University of Munich