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Political Framing: US COVID19 Blame Game

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12467))

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Abstract

Through the use of Twitter, framing has become a prominent presidential campaign tool for politically active users. Framing is used to influence thoughts by evoking a particular perspective on an event. In this paper, we show that the COVID19 pandemic rather than being viewed as a public health issue, political rhetoric surrounding it is mostly shaped through a blame frame (blame Trump, China, or conspiracies) and a support frame (support candidates) backing the agenda of Republican and Democratic users in the lead up to the 2020 presidential campaign. We elucidate the divergences between supporters of both parties on Twitter via the use of frames. Additionally, we show how framing is used to positively or negatively reinforce users’ thoughts. We look at how Twitter can efficiently be used to identify frames for topics through a reproducible pipeline.

This paper was accepted at SocInfo2020. Please cite the SocInfo version.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    GOP: Grand Old Party; DNC: Democratic National Committee.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Humanities and Social Sciences, HBKU, Doha, Qatar

    Chereen Shurafa & Wajdi Zaghouani

  2. Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Doha, Qatar

    Kareem Darwish

Authors
  1. Chereen Shurafa
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  2. Kareem Darwish
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  3. Wajdi Zaghouani
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chereen Shurafa .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

    Samin Aref

  2. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Kalina Bontcheva

  3. King’s College London, London, UK

    Marco Braghieri

  4. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Frank Dignum

  5. ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Fosca Giannotti

  6. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Francesco Grisolia

  7. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Dino Pedreschi

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Shurafa, C., Darwish, K., Zaghouani, W. (2020). Political Framing: US COVID19 Blame Game. In: Aref, S., et al. Social Informatics. SocInfo 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12467. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60975-7_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60975-7_25

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-60974-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-60975-7

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