COVID views: City talk vs Country talk on Twitter

Halfway through 2022, over 100 million Americans caught COVID-19, with rural areas seeing a higher death rate. Interestingly, Twitter users in rural and urban settings shared different opinions about the pandemic. To understand this better, researchers analyzed millions of tweets from May 2020 to January 2022, focusing on geolocated posts. They used machine learning to group these tweets into COVID-19 topics and studied sentiments. Surprisingly, urban users mostly avoided controversial hashtags like “covidiots” and “China virus”, while rural users disliked “Dr. Fauci” and “plandemic”. Both groups strongly disapproved of certain politicians. Urban users started to feel more positive about the economy by late 2021, likely reflecting the nation's economic recovery. This shows that social media can help monitor public sentiment during crises and inform pandemic response efforts in different regions.