Abstract
Twitter is a powerful tool for world leaders to disseminate public health information and to reach citizens. While Twitter, like other platforms, affords world leaders the opportunity to rapidly present information to citizens, the discourse is often politically framed. In this study, we analysed how leaders’ of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing group use Twitter to frame the COVID-19 virus. Specifically, four research questions were explored: 1) How frequently did each leader tweet about COVID-19 in 2020? 2) Which frames emerged from tweet content of each leader regarding COVID-19? 3) What was the overall tweet valence of each leader regarding COVID-19? and 4) To what extent can leaders’ future tweets be predicted by the data? We used natural language processing (NLP) and conducted sentiment analysis via Python to identify frames and to compare the leaders’ messaging. Results showed that of the leaders, President Trump tweeted the most, with Prime Minister Morrison posting the least number of tweets. The majority of each leaders’ tweets were positive, while President Trump had the most negative tweets. Predictive modelling of tweet behavior was highly accurate.
Highlights
In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic
For this study we focus on how these leaders are composing their tweets on COVID-19, though there is the potential for future work to explore a larger corpus that includes the threaded conversations
In line with suggestions to further clarify how COVID-19 is framed (Rufai & Bunce, 2020; Wicke & Bolognesi, 2020), and building off of methodological developments using sentiment analysis and natural language processing to explore human language and communication (Burscher et al, 2014; Evans et al, 2019; Oz, et al, 2018; Havens, and Bisgin, 2018) we pose the following research questions about the Twitter behaviour of the Five Eyes leaders regarding COVID-19: RQ1: How frequently did each leader tweet about COVID-19 in 2020? RQ2: Which frames emerged from tweet content of each leader regarding COVID-19? RQ3: What was the overall tweet valence of each leader regarding COVID-19? RQ4: To what extent can leaders’ future tweets be predicted by the data?
Summary
In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Since December 2019, more than 170 million people have been infected with the virus and more than 3.5 million have died (Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, updated daily). As governments and citizens grapple with lockdowns and social distancing, people have increasingly used social media to communicate their thoughts, opinions, beliefs, feelings and information about the virus (Wicke and Bolognesi, 2020). Leaders have increasingly turned to social media as a platform to disseminate information about the virus, government response plans, to promote public health, and to connect with citizens (Hubner, 2021; Rufai and Bunce, 2020)
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