Evaluating the cohesion of municipalities’ discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic

• Victor Antonio Menuzzo Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)
• André Santanchè Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)
• Luiz Gomes-Jr Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (UTFPR)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbbd.2021.17888

Resumo

Social media has been used as a method to alert and raise awareness among the population to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the discourse of municipalities and their respective mayors may have an influence on the behavior of the population and thus directly impact COVID-19 outcomes. This paper analyzes the diversity and cohesion of these discourses through posts published on Facebook, evaluating (i) diversity of topics discussed, (ii) topic evolution, and (iii) deviation from a central discourse. We also combine this information with epidemiological data to assess impact in the outcomes. In particular, we present two different Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) models to analyze how topics are being discussed by municipalities/mayors and compare how cohesion is related to the evolution of the pandemic. Our initial analysis suggests that municipalities tend to employ a unified discourse as a response to the worsening of epidemic outcomes. The results of our study could help to inform governments of better communication strategies in this and future health crisis.

Palavras-chave: COVID-19, discourse analysis, cohesion, LDA, topic modeling

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