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Politics is an area that is traditionally believed to be gender divided. According to intergroup communication theory, this gender-salient context might cause differences in political communications between genders. Moreover, the internet and social media, which creates a computer-mediated interactive context, might also impact the traditional gender discrepancies in political discourse. This study used Twitter trace-data and computational text analysis to examine such suppositions. By analyzing over one million tweets, we found that compared to men, women generally had a stronger sense of group awareness and cohesion and showed a desire to promote their tweets while avoiding addressing other users in political discussions. Women also focused on family- and home-related issues more than men did. These findings suggest that Twitter is not an ideal public sphere where differences and inequalities are eliminated, but it might be a counter-public sphere that promotes the voices and increases the publicity of marginalized groups.

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The U.S. confronts an unprecedented public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, in the presidential election year in 2020. In such a compound situation, a real-time dynamic examination of how the general public ascribe the crisis responsibilities taking account to their political ideologies is helpful for developing effective strategies to manage the crisis and diminish hostility toward particular groups caused by polarization. Social media, such as Twitter, provide platforms for the public’s COVID-related discourse to form, accumulate, and visibly present. Meanwhile, those features also make social media a window to monitor the public responses in real-time. This research conducted a computational text analysis of 2,918,376 tweets sent by 829,686 different U.S. users regarding COVID-19 from January 24 to May 25, 2020. Results indicate that the public’s crisis attribution and attitude toward governmental crisis responses are driven by their political identities. One crisis factor identified by this study (i.e., threat level) also affects the public’s attribution and attitude polarization. Additionally, we note that pandemic fatigue was identified in our findings as early as in March 2020. This study has theoretical, practical, and methodological implications informing further health communication in a heated political environment.