TY - JOUR AU - Hua, Tim AU - Kim, Chris Chankyo AU - Zhang, Zihan AU - Lyford, Alex PY - 2021/03/31 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - COVID-19 Tweets of Governors and Health Experts: Deaths, Masks, and The Economy JF - Journal of Student Research JA - J Stud Res VL - 10 IS - 1 SE - DO - 10.47611/jsr.v10i1.1171 UR - https://www.jsr.org/index.php/path/article/view/1171 SP - AB - <p>As COVID-19 spread throughout the United States, governors and health experts (HEs) received a surge in followers on Twitter. This paper seeks to investigate how HEs, Democratic governors, and Republican governors discuss COVID-19 on Twitter. Tweets dating from January 1<sup>st</sup>, 2020 to October 18<sup>th</sup>, 2020 from official accounts of all fifty governors and 46 prominent U.S.-based HEs were scraped using python package Twint (N = 192,403) and analyzed using a custom-built wordcount program (Twintproject, 2020). The most significant finding is that in 2020, Democratic governors mentioned death at 4.03 times the rate of Republican governors in their COVID-19 tweets. In 2019, Democratic governors still mentioned death at twice the rate of Republicans. We believe we have substantial evidence that Republican governors are less comfortable talking about death than their Democratic counterparts.</p><p>We also found that Democratic governors tweet about masks, stay-at-home measures, and solutions more often than Republicans. After controlling for state-level variations in COVID-19 data, our regression model confirms that party affiliation is still correlated with the prevalence of tweets in these three categories. However, there isn’t a large difference between the proportion of COVID-19 tweets, tweets about the economy, tweets about vaccines, and tweets containing “science-like” words between governors of the two parties.</p><p>HEs tweeted about death and vaccines more than the governors. They also tweeted about solutions and testing at a similar rate compared to governors and mentioned lockdowns, the economy, and masks less frequently.</p> ER -