COVID-19’s Role in Amplifying Affective Polarization on Spanish Twitter/X During the First State of Alarm

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-868-4_22How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Affective polarisation; COVID-19; political actors; sentiment analysis; Twitter; social media

Abstract

Spain has been characterised as one of the countries with the greatest affective polarisation. Divergences go from being political to fostering social division, and this phenomenon has been aggravated in social media during COVID-19. This article analyses the public discussion held on Twitter (now, X) in Spain during March-June 2020, when the first restrictions came into force. The research shows how the coronavirus has been used as an issue of confrontation between the main political actors, while substantive debates related to public health were relegated. Using the sentiment analysis technique, 368,371 tweets were analysed, corresponding to 27 profiles of political leaders, 12 political parties and 34 profiles related to the media. The study examines the polarisation of the public conversation held on Twitter and which actors have the most negative impact on the online public debate, as well as the communicational behaviour of the actors analysed. The results show that opposition leaders concentrated most of the negative polarised content. In contrast, government actors tended toward more moderate or positive messaging, while media displayed predominantly neutral tones.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Santiago Giraldo Luque
AU  - Cristina Fernández Rovira
AU  - Martí Fernández Saboya
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/10/22
TI  - COVID-19’s Role in Amplifying Affective Polarization on Spanish Twitter/X During the First State of Alarm
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Communication and Applied Technologies 2025 (ICOMTA 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 230
EP  - 240
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-868-4_22
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-868-4_22
ID  - Luque2025
ER  -