The effect of political polarization on social distance stances in the Brazilian COVID-19 scenario

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the routine and concerns of people around the world since 2020. The alarming contagious rate and the lack of treatment or vaccine evoked different reactions to controlling and mitigating the virus's contagious. In this paper, we developed a case study on the Brazilian COVID scenario, investigating the influence of the political polarization in the pro/against stances of social isolation, represented in Twitter by two groups referred to as the Cloroquiners and Quarenteners. We analyzed these groups according to multiple dimensions: a) concerns expressed by each group and main arguments representing each stance; b) techniques to automatically infer from users political orientation, c) network analysis and community detection to characterize their behavior as a social network group and d) analysis of linguistic characteristics to identify psychological aspects. We propose combining two topic modeling techniques, LDA and BERTopics, to understand each stance's concerns in different granularity levels. Our main findings confirm that Cloroquiners are right-wing partisans, whereas Quarenteners are more related to the left-wing. Cloroquiners and Quarenteners' political polarization influences the arguments of economy and life and a stronger support/opposition to the president. As a group, the network of Cloroquiners is more closed and connected, and Quarenteners have a more diverse political engagement with a community of users polarized only with left-wing politicians and his supporters. In terms of psychological aspects, polarized groups come together on cognitive issues and negative emotions.