How America is talking about the coronavirus | NP Agency
Insights

Protected: How America is talking about the coronavirus

As America continues to adjust to the reality of COVID-19, they’ve taken to the Internet to talk about it.  We analyzed 120 million social media posts originating from users in the United States over the last week to understand how people were reacting.

From 10am eastern on March 9 through 10am eastern on March 16, there was a 206% increase in posts, which have a net -42% sentiment rating in the U.S.

We’ve included some of our most interesting findings below.

Age

The most interesting thing about the age breakdown — and maybe the most interesting thing we found — is that the index rates track along with the reported mortality rates of the disease, with 65+ over-indexing the most and all groups under age 44 – and particularly under 34 – under-indexing.

(If you’re unfamiliar, index rates are the multiple of expected conversation from a group given the underlying population of users in the wider data set.  1 is a completely average conversation.  Greater than one means more people from that cohort are talking about an issue than their numbers would suggest they should be.)

 

Ethnicity

Most groups track reasonably close to normal, with Hispanics slightly over-indexing in the U.S. and Native Americans — with around 120,000 identified social posts — dramatically under-indexing. We can’t say why Native Americans aren’t talking about this as much as we would expect, but it’s a data point that may indicate more outreach may be needed within that community to increase awareness of and risks associated with COVID-19.

 

Partisanship

There are more advanced ways to match and model known partisan leanings on social media, but for our purposes, we’re looking at a simpler set of data: words people use in their Twitter bios.

Using this method, there appears to be a dramatic difference between Republicans and Democrats.  Trump supporters seem to be far more conversant online about COVID-19 over the last week, at a rate that is more than double that of those that have Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders mentions in their bios.

Those that have “Trump” in their bios accounted for 2% of all posts, but indexed at 2.17 times expected volume. #MAGA indexed at 1.85.  Those using “Biden” or “Bernie” in their bios were less than 1%. Those using Biden indexed at exactly 1, and those with Bernie were just barely higher at 1.04.

Our theory: Trump is still the President, and many supporters have always been willing to speak out on the same issues he’s dealing with at any given moment.  At the same time, the biggest news of 2020 had been the Democratic primary, which was winding down just as the coronavirus began to impact the U.S.

 

Words and Phrases

When you have 120 million social posts, you can see patterns that emerge in phrasing.  The charts below show the top ten words that appear most frequently across three categories: emotions, behaviors, and people.  Red phrases are driving negative sentiment, green drive positive.

 

Trending

If we look back at the week, we can see what topics have been increasing in frequency over time and what the next couple of days may look like.  Unsurprisingly, as schools and businesses closed across the country, “stay” has had the most posts by far.

 

Popular Posts

We looked at the top five tweets based on engagement — which is simply retweets and replies added together.

  1. The most popular post came from @briantylercohen, featuring a video of Rep. Katie Porter laying out the math that Americans face with they think they may be infected and getting the CDC to commit to making testing free. The video has more than 26 million views, and the tweet was liked more than 607,000 times, with a 51% net sentiment score.

  1. You’ve likely seen videos of Italians signing on balconies, and a @NicholsUprising post with nearly 800,000 likes and a 63% net sentiment rating.

  1. @tastefullytayy posts about the pasta crisis that’s happening along side the pandemic in Italy. The post has a -60% sentiment rating.

  1. Former President Barack Obama shared a chart about the importance of social distancing and shutting down large parts of every day life. His post has an 8% net sentiment rating.

  1. @mvazquez17 jokes about sending his dog out for supplies, after it was shown that dogs can’t contract COVID-19. The post has a 33% net sentiment rating.

https://twitter.com/mvazquez17/status/1238511230542897154

 

Emojis

Always relevant to social conversation, even in a pandemic.

 

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