Ideological variation in preferred content and source credibility on Reddit during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this exploratory study, we examine political polarization regarding the online discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use data from Reddit to explore the differences in the topics emphasized by different subreddits according to political ideology. We also examine whether there are systematic differences in the credibility of sources shared by the subscribers of subreddits that vary by ideology, and in the tendency to share information from sources implicated in spreading COVID-19 misinformation.

Topic Analysis of Traditional and Social Media News Coverage of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Public Health Communication.

Objective: To characterize and compare early coverage of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in newspapers, television, and social media, and discuss implications for public health communication strategies that are relevant to an initial pandemic response.

Methods: Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), an unsupervised topic modeling technique, analysis of 3271 newspaper articles, 40 cable news shows transcripts, 96,000 Twitter posts, and 1000 Reddit posts during March 4-12, 2020, a period chronologically early in the timeframe of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results: Coverage of COVID-19 clustered on topics such as epidemic, politics, and the economy, and these varied across media sources.