Conspiracies, misinformation and resistance to public health measures during COVID-19 in white nationalist online communication.

Recent studies documented alarming growth in antiscientific discourse among extremist groups online and especially the relatively high anti-vaccine attitudes among White Nationalists (WN). In light of accelerated politization of COVID-19 containment measures and the expansion of containment to lockdowns, masking, and more, we examine current sentiment, themes and argumentation in white nationalist discourse, regarding the COVID-19 vaccines and other containment measures. We use unsupervised machine learning approaches to analyze all conversations posted in the "Coronavirus (Covid-19)" sub-forum on Stormfront between January 2020 and December 2021 (N = 9642 posts). Additionally, we manually analyze sentiment and argumentation in 300 randomly sampled posts. We identified four discursive themes: Science, Conspiracies, Sociopolitical, and Containment. Negative- sentiment was substantially higher than what was found in prior work done before COVID-19 regarding vaccines and other containment measures. The negativity was driven mostly by arguments adapted from the anti-vaccine movement and not by WN ideology.

Hashtag activism in a politicized pandemic: Framing the campaign to include Taiwan in the World Health Organization’s efforts to combat COVID-19

We examined hashtag activism promoting Taiwan?s participation in the global efforts to combat COVID-19. We employed the computational Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN) to examine the discourse around the #TaiwanCanHelp/#TWforWHO campaign in 2020 (N?=?163,876) on Twitter. Our model identified 35 topics clustered within three frames. The containment frame emphasized strategies used to stop COVID-19?s spread in Taiwan. The geopolitics frame described China?s use of its international power to exclude Taiwan from the World Health Organization. The international cooperation frame emphasized Taiwan?s ability and efficacy to contribute to the global efforts to slow down COVID-19. These results extend our understanding of hashtag activism by examining the intersection of geopolitics and global health crises. We introduce the theoretical concept of a mutually beneficial coalition, one that points to detrimental impacts of oppression on both the oppressed and the allies who are asked to help.

The Framing of COVID-19 in Italian Media and Its Relationship with Community Mobility: A Mixed-Method Approach.

Media framing of epidemics was found to influence public perceptions and behaviors in experiments, yet no research has been conducted on real-world behaviors during public health crises. We examined the relationship between Italian news media coverage of COVID-19 and compliance with stay-at-home orders, which could impact the spread of epidemics. We used a computational method for framing analysis (ANTMN) and combined it with Google's Community Mobility data. A time-series analysis using vector autoregressive models showed that the Italian media used media frames that were largely congruent with ones used by journalists in other countries: A scientific frame focusing on symptoms and health effects, a containment frame focusing on attempts to ameliorate risks, and a social frame, focusing on political and social impact. The prominence of different media frames over time was associated with changes in Italians' mobility patterns. Specifically, we found that the social frame was associated with increased mobility, whereas the containment frame was associated with decreased mobility. The results demonstrate that the ways the news media discuss epidemics can influence changes in community mobility, above and beyond the effect of the number of deaths per day.