Engaging with COVID-19 content on social media in the United States: Does political affiliation matter?

Abstract

While the partisanship of U.S. media outlets is well documented, the role of political affiliation in social media adoption and online discussions is much less studied. Social media allow individuals to contribute to the dissemination of information. As a result, understanding the relationship between political affiliation and content-sharing behaviors provides insight into whose voices are represented in social media content. Political affiliation might be particularly pertinent to engagement with politically charged topics, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper uses survey data collected in Spring 2020 to examine the role of political affiliation in both social media adoption and content sharing about COVID-19 on three platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Subsequently, we look at how these factors relate to COVID-19 knowledge, an important outcome with broader health implications. We find that political affiliation relates to both site adoption and sharing on the platforms, but these are not uniform across all three platforms. We find no connection between political affiliation and knowledge about the virus but we do find that content sharing on two of the examined platforms is negatively related to knowledge. This work has larger implications for other contexts where polarized and politicized arguments take place, such as climate change and other contentious topics as it concerns both whose voices are heard in these discourses as well as what people can take away from engaging with content.