#EsteVirusloParamosUnidos: War-like political communication on Twitter. Creating homogeneous communities in the Covid-19 crisis

Abstract

This article analyses the political communication on Twitter of the Government of Spain at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The #estevirusloparamosunidos campaign on Twitter is monitored during the dates with the worst results in terms of fatalities (March 31th- April, 4th, 2020). The sample included in total 398 523 tweets in four data sets. Through the Social Network Analysis, the main actors and the main interactions between users are identified. The research shows a high coincidence between the typology of the Press Conference Spokespersons and the main actors on the analyzed hashtag, prioritizing the Spanish Administration and the Armed Forces. There was also a high relationship of the main opinion leaders with their “natural spectrum”. We conclude that in this hashtag there was a “war-like” atmosphere. Via the computer-based text analysis we identify that the word ‘government’ was mentioned more than medical words and that there are present some military-like terms.

Social Network Analysis of Basic Necessity Scarcity on Twitter: Evidence from Indonesia

“…Social networking issues are examined through SNA, with past Twitter studies employing SNA in the fields of social science (Bahri & Widhyharto, 2021;Budi & Pamungkas, 2020;Sari et al, 2021;Tous-Rovirosa & Dergacheva, 2021), computer science (Alwafi, 2021;Morales-I-gras et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2021), medicine (Bedford-petersen & Weston, 2021;Moukarzel et al, 2021;Nazar & Pieters, 2021), engineering (Fani et al, 2020;Madani et al, 2020;Rathnayake, 2021) and business management and accounting (Battisti et al, 2021;Watanabe et al, 2021). From the analysis results on Scopus for Twitter, 276 articles published from 2006 to 2021 employed SNA.…”

Emotions during the Pandemic’s First Wave: The Case of Greek Tweets

“…Despite its widespread use in social media analysis, only few publications used SNA on Twitter data during the COVID-19 pandemic. In most cases, their aim was to figure out opinion leaders, guiding the polemics between mainstream positions and partisan opinions which were sometimes prone to misinformation and conspiracy theories [44][45][46][47][48][49][50]. Though such approaches involve recognizing discrete communities within the network, only [51] emphasized the search of such communities or "clusters expressing mistrustful opinions on COVID-19 vaccination.…”

Emotions during the Pandemic’s First Wave: The Case of Greek Tweets

“…Despite its widespread use in social media analysis, only few publications used SNA on Twitter data during the COVID-19 pandemic. In most cases, their aim was to figure out opinion leaders, guiding the polemics between mainstream positions and partisan opinions, which were sometimes prone to misinformation and conspiracy theories[44][45][46][47][48][49][50]. Though such approaches involve recognizing discrete communities within the network, only Boucher et al[51] emphasized the search of such communities or "clusters expressing mistrustful opinions on COVID-19 vaccination.…”