scholarly journals Political Partisanship and Anti-Science Attitudes in Online Discussions about COVID-19 (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashwin Rao ◽  
Fred Morstatter ◽  
Minda Hu ◽  
Emily Chen ◽  
Keith Burghardt ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Temporal Distribution ◽  
Online Discussions ◽  
Science Attitudes ◽  
Large Set ◽  
Political Partisanship ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

BACKGROUND The novel coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage communities across the US. Opinion surveys identified importance of political ideology in shaping perceptions of the pandemic and compliance with preventive measures. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to measure political partisanship and anti-science attitudes in the discussions about the pandemic on social media, as well as their geographic and temporal distribution. METHODS We analyze a large set of tweets related to the pandemic collected between January and May of 2020 and develop methods to classify the ideological alignment of users along the moderacy (hardline vs moderate), political (liberal vs conservative) and science (anti-science vs pro-science) dimensions. RESULTS We find that polarization along the science and political dimensions are correlated. Moreover, politically moderate users are more aligned with the pro-science views, while hardline users are more aligned with anti-science views. Contrary to expectations, we do not find that polarization grows over time; instead, we see increasing activity by moderate pro-science users. We also show that anti-science conservatives tend to tweet from the Southern and Northwestern US, while anti-science moderates from the Western states. The proportion of anti-science conservatives are found to correlate with COVID-19 cases. CONCLUSIONS Our findings shed light on the multi-dimensional nature of polarization, and the feasibility of tracking polarized opinions about the pandemic across time and space through social media data.

scholarly journals Socioeconomic Correlates of Anti-Science Attitudes in the US

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 160
Author(s):  
Minda Hu ◽  
Ashwin Rao ◽  
Mayank Kejriwal ◽  
Kristina Lerman
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Science Attitudes ◽  
Vaccination Rates ◽  
Spatially Resolved ◽  
Political Partisanship ◽  
The Us ◽  
Urban Places

Successful responses to societal challenges require sustained behavioral change. However, as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the US showed, political partisanship and mistrust of science can reduce public willingness to adopt recommended behaviors such as wearing a mask or receiving a vaccination. To better understand this phenomenon, we explored attitudes toward science using social media posts (tweets) that were linked to counties in the US through their locations. The data allowed us to study how attitudes towards science relate to the socioeconomic characteristics of communities in places from which people tweet. Our analysis revealed three types of communities with distinct behaviors: those in large metro centers, smaller urban places, and rural areas. While partisanship and race are strongly associated with the share of anti-science users across all communities, income was negatively and positively associated with anti-science attitudes in suburban and rural areas, respectively. We observed that emotions in tweets, specifically negative high arousal emotions, are expressed among suburban and rural communities by many anti-science users, but not in communities in large urban places. These trends were not apparent when pooled across all counties. In addition, we found that anti-science attitudes expressed five years earlier were significantly associated with lower COVID-19 vaccination rates. Our analysis demonstrates the feasibility of using spatially resolved social media data to monitor public attitudes on issues of social importance.

scholarly journals Deep Sentiment Classification and Topic Discovery on Novel Coronavirus or COVID-19 Online Discussions: NLP Using LSTM Recurrent Neural Network Approach

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamed Jelodar ◽  
Yongli Wang ◽  
Rita Orji ◽  
Hucheng Huang
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Recurrent Neural Network ◽  
Online Discussions ◽  
Sentiment Classification ◽  
World Health ◽  
Computational Techniques ◽  
Public Opinions ◽  
The World ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

AbstractInternet forums and public social media, such as online healthcare forums, provide a convenient channel for users (people/patients) concerned about health issues to discuss and share information with each other. In late December 2019, an outbreak of a novel coronavirus (infection from which results in the disease named COVID-19) was reported, and, due to the rapid spread of the virus in other parts of the world, the World Health Organization declared a state of emergency. In this paper, we used automated extraction of COVID-19–related discussions from social media and a natural language process (NLP) method based on topic modeling to uncover various issues related to COVID-19 from public opinions. Moreover, we also investigate how to use LSTM recurrent neural network for sentiment classification of COVID-19 comments. Our findings shed light on the importance of using public opinions and suitable computational techniques to understand issues surrounding COVID-19 and to guide related decision-making.

scholarly journals Political Partisanship and Anti-Science Attitudes in Online Discussions about COVID-19 (Preprint)

10.2196/26692 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashwin Rao ◽  
Fred Morstatter ◽  
Minda Hu ◽  
Emily Chen ◽  
Keith Burghardt ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Online Discussions ◽  
Science Attitudes ◽  
Political Partisanship

scholarly journals Ideology, policy decision-making and environmental impact in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic in the US

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Prieto-Rodriguez ◽  
Rafael Salas ◽  
Douglas Noonan ◽  
Francisco Tomas Cabeza-Martinez ◽  
Javier Ramos-Gutierrez
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Political Partisanship ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One

Covid-19 pandemic was a challenge for the health systems of many countries. It altered people's way of life and shocked the world economy. In the United States, political ideology has clashed with the fight against the pandemic. President Trump's denial prevailed despite the warnings from the WHO and scientists who alerted of the seriousness of the situation. Despite this, some state governments did not remain passive in the absence of federal government measures, and passed laws restricting mobility (lockdowns). Consequently, the political polarity was accentuated. On the one hand, the defenders of more severe public health measures and, on the other, the advocates of individual rights and freedom above any other consideration. In this study, we analyze whether political partisanship and the political ideology has influenced the way Covid-19 was handled at the outbreak. Specifically, we analyze by using a Diff-in-Diff model, whether the ideology of each state, measure at three levels, affected the decrease in the NO2 levels observed after the pandemic outbreak in the US. We distinguish three alternative post-Covid periods and results show that the State ideology has a robust negative impact on the NO2 levels. There is an important difference between Democratic and Republican states, not just in the scope and following-up of the mobility and activity restrictions, but also in the speed they implemented them.

scholarly journals American Exceptionalism: Determinants of spreading COVID-19 misinformation online in five countries

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Pickup ◽  
Dominik Stecula ◽  
Clifton van der Linden
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Us ◽  
Global Nature ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

Social media have long been considered a venue in which conspiracy theories originate and spread. It has been no different during COVID-19. However, understanding who spreads conspiracy theories by sharing them on social media, and why, has been underexplored, especially in a cross-national context. The global nature of the novel coronavirus pandemic presents a unique opportunity to understand the exposure and sharing of the same COVID-19 related conspiracies across multiple countries. We rely on large, nationally representative surveys conducted in July of 2020 in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, to begin to understand who shares conspiracies on social media and what motivates them. We find that Americans are no more likely to encounter prominent COVID-19 conspiracies on social media but are considerably more likely to subsequently share them. In all countries, trust in information from social media predicts conspiracy theory sharing, while in the US politics plays a unique role Our results make clear that American behavior on social media has the potential to poison online public discourse globally.

Design and in-silico screening of Peptide Nucleic Acid (PNA) inspired novel pronucleotide scaffolds targeting COVID-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bichismita Sahu ◽  
Santosh Kumar Behera ◽  
Rudradip Das ◽  
Tanay Dalvi ◽  
Arnab Chowdhury ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Nucleic Acid ◽  
In Silico ◽  
Peptide Nucleic Acid ◽  
Large Set ◽  
Nonstructural Proteins ◽  
In Silico Screening ◽  
Replication Process ◽  
Enveloped Virus ◽  
Treatment Regimens ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

Introduction: The outburst of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, at the end of December 2019 has turned itself into a pandemic taking a heavy toll on human lives. The causal agent being SARS-CoV-2, a member of the long-known Coronaviridae family, is a positive sense single-stranded enveloped virus and quite closely related to SARS-CoV. It has become the need of the hour to understand the pathophysiology of this disease, so that drugs, vaccines, treatment regimens and plausible therapeutic agents can be produced. Methods: In this regard, recent studies uncovered the fact that the viral genome of SARS-CoV-2 encodes nonstructural proteins like RNA dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) which is an important tool for its transcription and replication process. A large number of nucleic acid based anti-viral drugs are being repurposed for treating COVID-19 targeting RdRp. Few of them are in the advanced stage of clinical trials including Remdesivir. While performing close investigation of the large set of nucleic acid based drugs, we were surprised to find that the synthetic nucleic acid backbone is explored very little or rare. Results: We have designed scaffolds derived from peptide nucleic acid (PNA) and subjected them for in-silico screening systematically. These designed molecules have demonstrated excellent binding towards RdRp. Compound 12 was found to possess similar binding affinity as Remdesivir with comparable pharmacokinetics. However, the in-silico toxicity prediction indicates compound 12 may be a superior molecule which can be explored further due to its excellent safety-profile with LD50 (12,000mg/kg) as opposed to Remdesivir (LD50 =1000mg/kg). Conclusion: Compound 12 falls in the safe category of class 6. Synthetic feasibility, equipotent binding and very low toxicity of this peptide nucleic acid derived compounds can serve as a leading scaffold to design, synthesize and evaluate many of similar compounds for the treatment of COVID-19.

Measuring Relevant Information in Health Social Network Conversations and Clinical Diagnosis Cases (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Moreira ◽  
Raul Alonso-Calvo ◽  
Alberto Muñoz ◽  
Jose Crespo
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Online Discussions ◽  
Biomedical Knowledge ◽  
Expert Opinions ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Health Social Network ◽  
Discussion System ◽  
Clinical Cases

BACKGROUND Internet and Social media is an enormous source of information. Health Social Networks and online collaborative environments enable users to create shared content that afterwards can be discussed. While social media discussions for health related matters constitute a potential source of knowledge, characterizing the relevance of participations from different users is a challenging task. OBJECTIVE The aim of this paper is to present a methodology designed for quantifying relevant information provided by different participants in clinical online discussions. METHODS A set of key indicators for different aspects of clinical conversations and specific clinical contributions within a discussion have been defined. These indicators make use of biomedical knowledge extraction based on standard terminologies and ontologies. These indicators allow measuring the relevance of information of each participant of the clinical conversation. RESULTS Proposed indicators have been applied to two discussions extracted from PatientsLikeMe, as well as to two real clinical cases from the Sanar collaborative discussion system. Results obtained from indicators in the tested cases have been compared with clinical expert opinions to check indicators validity. CONCLUSIONS The methodology has been successfully used for describing participant interactions in real clinical cases belonging to a collaborative clinical case discussion tool and from a conversation from a Health Social Network.

scholarly journals Faster than warp speed: early attention to COVD-19 by anti-vaccine groups on Facebook

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth C Kalichman ◽  
Lisa A Eaton ◽  
Valerie A Earnshaw ◽  
Natalie Brousseau
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Vaccine Development ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Development Program ◽  
Vaccine Safety ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Vaccine Information

Abstract Background The unprecedented rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines has faced SARS-CoV- (COVID-19) vaccine hesitancy, which is partially fueled by the misinformation and conspiracy theories propagated by anti-vaccine groups on social media. Research is needed to better understand the early COVID-19 anti-vaccine activities on social media. Methods This study chronicles the social media posts concerning COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines by leading anti-vaccine groups (Dr Tenpenny on Vaccines, the National Vaccine Information Center [NVIC] the Vaccination Information Network [VINE]) and Vaccine Machine in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic (February–May 2020). Results Analysis of 2060 Facebook posts showed that anti-vaccine groups were discussing COVID-19 in the first week of February 2020 and were specifically discussing COVID-19 vaccines by mid-February 2020. COVID-19 posts by NVIC were more widely disseminated and showed greater influence than non-COVID-19 posts. Early COVID-19 posts concerned mistrust of vaccine safety and conspiracy theories. Conclusion Major anti-vaccine groups were sowing seeds of doubt on Facebook weeks before the US government launched its vaccine development program ‘Operation Warp Speed’. Early anti-vaccine misinformation campaigns outpaced public health messaging and hampered the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.

Social Media in Surgery

2020 ◽  
pp. 000313482097297
Author(s):  
Kevin N. Harrell ◽  
Dominique Vervoort ◽  
Jessica G.Y. Luc ◽  
Brett M. Tracy ◽  
John Daniel Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
International Collaboration ◽  
Community Outreach ◽  
Online Discussions ◽  
Residency Programs ◽  
Online Presence ◽  
Personal Branding

Social media has become a permeating form of communication with billions of daily users. Twitter in particular has become a tool for the surgical community to engage with other providers, as well as patients, through active online discussions, sharing of research, and highlighting opportunities for community outreach. Twitter can help with personal branding, mentorship, and international collaboration on multiple types of academic endeavors. Likewise, institutional and residency programs can harness the power of social media to develop an online presence and aid in resident recruitment.

Public perceptions of who counts as a scientist for controversial science

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 797-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianne Suldovsky ◽  
Asheley Landrum ◽  
Natalie Jomini Stroud
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Genetically Modified Organisms ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Us ◽  
Science Media

In an era where expertise is increasingly critiqued, this study draws from the research on expertise and scientist stereotyping to explore who the public considers to be a scientist in the context of media coverage about climate change and genetically modified organisms. Using survey data from the United States, we find that political ideology and science knowledge affect who the US public believes is a scientist in these domains. Our results suggest important differences in the role of science media attention and science media selection in the publics “scientist” labeling. In addition, we replicate previous work and find that compared to other people who work in science, those with PhDs in Biology and Chemistry are most commonly seen as scientists.

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