# Pandemic Culture Wars: Partisan Differences in the Moral Language of COVID-19 Discussions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18533 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18533/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Polarized Online Discourse on Abortion: Frames and Hostile Expressions among Liberals and Conservatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16831/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Moral Foundation Theory and Pre-Trained Language Models: Current Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13521/) (2024)
- [In-Group Love, Out-Group Hate: A Framework to Measure Affective Polarization via Contentious Online Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14414/) (2024)
- [Does Geo-co-location Matter? A Case Study of Public Health Conversations during COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17710/) (2024)
- [Gendered Divides in Online Discussions about Reproductive Rights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05443/) (2025)
- [Community-Aligned Behavior Under Uncertainty: Evidence of Epistemic Stance Transfer in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17572/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effective response to pandemics requires coordinated adoption of mitigation measures, like masking and quarantines, to curb a virus's spread. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, political divisions can hinder consensus on the appropriate response. To better understand these divisions, our study examines a vast collection of COVID-19-related tweets. We focus on five contentious issues: coronavirus origins, lockdowns, masking, education, and vaccines. We describe a weakly supervised method to identify issue-relevant tweets and employ state-of-the-art computational methods to analyze moral language and infer political ideology. We explore how partisanship and moral language shape conversations about these issues. Our findings reveal ideological differences in issue salience and moral language used by different groups. We find that conservatives use more negatively-valenced moral language than liberals and that political elites use moral rhetoric to a greater extent than non-elites across most issues. Examining the evolution and moralization on divisive issues can provide valuable insights into the dynamics of COVID-19 discussions and assist policymakers in better understanding the emergence of ideological divisions.