Patterns of COVID-19 Communication Among Americans: Analyzing Local Vulnerabilities, Polarization, and Political Dynamics

The communication among citizens during public health crises is poorly understood. To gain insight into the communication networks among regular Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, we monitored COVID-19 discourse on Twitter over the first three years of the pandemic, scrutinizing 4.5 million geotagged and randomly sampled tweets from 786,414 users across the country. We demonstrate that local political leanings and socioeconomic factors significantly influenced COVID-19 discourse. We identified vulnerabilities, such as the use of politicized, conspiratorial, and religious language, which predicted higher COVID-19 mortality in conservative communities, and uncovered evidence of communication resilience in liberal areas. Interestingly, citizens' COVID-19 communication was less politicized than that of news media, and Democratic politicians focusing on COVID-19 in late 2022 were more likely to lose elections. This study offers insights into public pandemic attitudes, local vulnerabilities, resilience patterns, and the predictive role of social media communication networks on public health and electoral outcomes.