Partisanship, health behavior, and policy attitudes in the early stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (). ©Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Jonathan Purtle, Zachary F Meisel, Raina M Merchant, Anish Agarwal. The themes associated with the Republican affiliation included China (OR 1.89, 95% CI 1.85-1.92), small business assistance (OR 1.27, 95% CI 1.23-1.3), congressional relief bills (OR 1.23, 95% CI 1.2-1.27), press briefings (OR 1.22, 95% CI 1.19-1.26), and economic recovery (OR 1.2, 95% CI 1.16-1.23).ĭivergent language use on social media corresponds to the partisan divide in the first several months of the course of the COVID-19 public health crisis.ĬOVID-19 Twitter US legislators content cross-sectional digital health infodemiology infoveillance language natural language processing policy policy makers politics sentiment social media.

The dominant themes in the Republican legislators' discourse included vaccine development (OR 1.51, 95% CI 1.47-1.55 P<.001) and hospital resources and equipment (OR 1.22, 95% CI 1.18-1.25). We used differential language analyses to compare the content and sentiment of tweets posted by legislators based on their party affiliation. We used Quorum (Quorum Analytics Inc) to access more than 300,000 tweets posted by US legislators from January 1 to October 10, 2020.

We examined the language used by the members of the US House and Senate during the first 10 months of the COVID-19 pandemic and measured content and sentiment based on the tweets that they shared. As policy makers continue to shape the national and local responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, the information they choose to share and how they frame their content provide key insights into the public and health care systems.

Among us twitter