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1. Wording Matters: the Effect of Linguistic Characteristics and Political Ideology on Resharing of COVID-19 Vaccine Tweets

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3637876  

   Borghouts, Judith ; Huang, Yicong ; Hopfer, Suellen ; Li, Chen ; Mark, Gloria ( January 2024 , ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction)

   Social media platforms are frequently used to share information and opinions around vaccinations. The more often a message is reshared, the wider the reach of the message and potential influence it may have on shaping people’s opinions to get vaccinated or not. We used a negative binomial regression to investigate whether a message’s linguistic characteristics (degree of concreteness, emotional arousal, and sentiment) and user characteristics (political ideology and number of followers) may influence users’ decisions to reshare tweets related to the COVID-19 vaccine. We analyzed US English-language tweets related to the COVID-19 vaccine between May 2020 and October 2021 (N = 236,054).

   Tweets with positive and high-arousal words were more often retweeted than negative, low-arousal tweets. Tweets with abstract words were more often retweeted than tweets with concrete words. In addition, while Liberal users were more likely to have tweets with a positive sentiment reshared, Conservative users were more likely to have tweets with a negative sentiment reshared. Our results can inform public health messaging on how to best phrase vaccine information to impact engagement and information resharing, and potentially persuade a wider set of people to get vaccinated.

    

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2. Pandemic Culture Wars: Partisan Differences in the Moral Language of COVID-19 Discussions

   Rao, Ashwin ; Guo, Siyi ; Wang, Nina ; Morstatter, Fred ; Lerman, Kristina ( May 2023 , arXivorg)

   Effective response to pandemics requires coordinated adoption of mitigation measures, like masking and quarantines, to curb a virus's spread. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, political divisions can hinder consensus on the appropriate response. To better understand these divisions, our study examines a vast collection of COVID-19-related tweets. We focus on five contentious issues: coronavirus origins, lockdowns, masking, education, and vaccines. We describe a weakly supervised method to identify issue-relevant tweets and employ state-of-the-art computational methods to analyze moral language and infer political ideology. We explore how partisanship and moral language shape conversations about these issues. Our findings reveal ideological differences in issue salience and moral language used by different groups. We find that conservatives use more negatively-valenced moral language than liberals and that political elites use moral rhetoric to a greater extent than non-elites across most issues. Examining the evolution and moralization on divisive issues can provide valuable insights into the dynamics of COVID-19 discussions and assist policymakers in better understanding the emergence of ideological divisions. 

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3. Deep Alignment with Country Shrinks the Moral Gap Between Conservatives and Liberals

   https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12534  

   Talaifar, Sanaz ; Swann, Jr., William B. ( October 2018 , Political Psychology)

   Moral foundations theory suggests that relative to liberals, conservatives care more about values that are believed to bind group members together: loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation. In contrast, we propose that individuals who are deeply aligned (“fused”) with their group should display elevated commitment to group‐oriented moral values, regardless of their political orientation. The results of three studies supported this hypothesis. The tendency for conservatives to endorse the binding foundations more than liberals only emerged among weakly and moderately fused Americans. In fact, liberals strongly fused with the United States endorsed “binding” foundationsmorethan average conservatives and to the same extent as strongly fused conservatives. These results indicate that to fully understand moral prerogatives, one must consider the nature of the connections people form to the group, as well as their political orientation.

    

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4. Political ideologies and moral foundations of engineering professionals in the United States

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2023.102379  

   Kim, Dayoung ; Jesiek, Brent K ( October 2023 , Technology in Society)

   Scholars have argued that engineering practice should be understood in its societal context, including the political contexts in which engineers perform. However, very few research studies have systematically explored the political and moral backgrounds of engineering professionals, who would be the main agents in the political contexts. This paper reports our exploratory study of the political ideologies and moral foundations of engineers in the United States. Based on survey responses from 515 engineers, we conducted generalized ordinal logistic regression analyses and multiple linear regression analyses to examine how engineers’ political ideologies are associated with their moral foundations and how engineers’ political ideologies and moral foundations vary across their employment sectors, organizational positions, and demographic attributes. We found that engineers in the manufacturing sector are more politically conservative than engineers in the computer/electronics/IT sector. Additionally, engineers in higher positions in their organizations are more politically conservative than engineers in lower positions, and female engineers are more politically liberal than male engineers. We also found that engineers’ endorsement of the five moral foundations differs by sector and demographic attributes. Moreover, engineers’ moral foundations substantially explain engineers’ political ideologies, consistent with previous studies using the Moral Foundations Theory. 

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5. Partisan asymmetries in exposure to misinformation

   Ashwin Rao, Fred Morstatter ( October 2022 , Science reports)

   Online misinformation is believed to have contributed to vaccine hesitancy during the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting concerns about social media’s destabilizing role in public life. Previous research identified a link between political conservatism and sharing misinformation; however, it is not clear how partisanship affects how much misinformation people see online. As a result, we do not know whether partisanship drives exposure to misinformation or people selectively share misinformation despite being exposed to factual content. To address this question, we study Twitter discussions about the Covid-19 pandemic, classifying users along the political and factual spectrum based on the information sources they share. In addition, we quantify exposure through retweet interactions. We uncover partisan asymmetries in the exposure to misinformation: conservatives are more likely to see and share misinformation, and while users’ connections expose them to ideologically congruent content, the interactions between political and factual dimensions create conditions for the highly polarized users—hardline conservatives and liberals—to amplify misinformation. Overall, however, misinformation receives less attention than factual content and political moderates, the bulk of users in our sample, help filter out misinformation. Identifying the extent of polarization and how political ideology exacerbates misinformation can help public health experts and policy makers improve their messaging. 

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