Covid-19 Infections and Sympathetic Social Media in Polarized Environments

• In Event: Politics Beyond the Left-Right Spectrum

Abstract

Do social media users are sympathetic with leaders contracting Covid-19 even in polarized environments? Relying on textual analysis using supervised machine learning techniques, the study analyzes more than 50,000 twitter replies to the announcement of Covid-19 infection by Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. To observe how these reactions compare to other tweets, the study replicates the technique for other highly replied tweets (those with more than 20,000 replies). The findings show that polarization is still evident in the context of a Covid-19 infection announcement. Nonetheless, it is possible to observe more middle ground replies for this kind of tweet than for other highly replied tweets.

Author

• Juan Salvador Gomez-Cruces, Georgia State University