Spanish power distance in Twitter in the Spanish COVID-19 crisis

Abstract

The objectives of this study are to suggest a specific taxonomy for the attitude markers used in Twitter after government decrees about coronavirus and to investigate if attitude markers indicate that power distance is accepted in Spain and if government decisions are respected. Finally, we study semantic webs in attitude markers. The corpus compiled for this study is composed by the tweets to the decrees of the Ministry of Health and Public Health from 12th to 16th March 2020. We analysed the data with the tools METOOL and GePhi. In the results it was observed that Spanish citizens preferred a closer relationship with power and it was noticed an increase in aggressive language. Finally, conclusions were drawn.