# COVID, BLM, and the polarization of US politicians on Twitter

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.03263 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03263/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [What are People Talking about in #BlackLivesMatter and #StopAsianHate? Exploring and Categorizing Twitter Topics Emerging in Online Social Movements through the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14725/) (2022)
- [Inference of Media Bias and Content Quality Using Natural-Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00237/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We mapped the tweets of 520 US Congress members, focusing on analyzing their engagement with two broad topics: first, the COVID-19 pandemic, and second, the recent wave of anti-racist protest. We find that, in discussing COVID-19, Democrats frame the issue in terms of public health, while Republicans are more likely to focus on small businesses and the economy. When looking at the discourse around anti-Black violence, we find that Democrats are far more likely to name police brutality as a specific concern. In contrast, Republicans not only discuss the issue far less, but also keep their terms more general, as well as criticizing perceived protest violence.