Pandemic Culture Wars: Partisan Asymmetries in the Moral Language of COVID-19 Discussions

Effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic required coordinated adoption of mitigation measures, like masking and quarantines, to curb virus's spread. However, political divisions that emerged early in the pandemic hindered 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 ideological divisions and moral language shape conversations about these issues. Our findings reveal ideological differences in issue salience and the dynamics of moral language. We find that conservatives use more negatively-valenced moral language than liberals, but moral language use by conservatives is less persistent and appears to be driven by dynamics of the news cycle. Furthermore, we find 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.