COVID 19,  Research,  Social Computing

Is a Democrat more likely to wear a mask than a Republican?? Unmasking the partisan combat, an analysis through Instagram

May 7, 2021 /

We analyze 3.91 million Instagram posts collected throughout 2020 from the 4 top Democratic and 4 top Republican states. Posts from Democratic states were found to have significantly higher percentages of detected masks, and significantly lower percentages of group photos, showing higher adoption of mask-wearing and social distancing measures than Republican states.

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed life in the world including, United States, with the country recording over 32.3 million cases and 574,000 deaths as of April, 2020. With the ongoing widespread vaccine rollout, the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions like mask-wearing mandates and stay-at-home laws have proved to be critical for stopping possible transmission routes.

In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential elections, mask-wearing and social distancing had become a partisan issue. According to Pew Research, people who lean Democratic are more likely than Republicans to say that they wore a mask, with conservative Republicans, being amongst the least likely to say they wore a mask, while liberal Democrats being amongst the most likely [2]. A significant difference was found between the percentage of people saying they wore a mask vs the percentage of people who said they saw others wearing a mask in the USA. Hence, quantifying the number of people actually wearing face-covering or following social distancing is a challenging task, which currently relies on on-ground surveys, or self-reported numbers [1]. Through this research, we move to social media for answers.

With its ease of access and global outreach, social media has a disproportionate influence on disseminating information during the COVID-19 pandemic. The general public and authorities have been using hashtags like #CoronaOutbreak, #COVID19, and #mask to disseminate important information and health advisories, which provides us with an opportunity to analyze behaviours. Realizing the potential of social media in capturing such events, we collect and utilize 3.9 million posts from Instagram to check for differences in mask-wearing and social distancing patterns between democratic and republican states.

Data

We collected public Instagram posts for the 4 most democratic states (Vermont, Maryland, California, and Massachusetts), and 4 most republican states (Wyoming, Oklahoma, West-Virginia and North-Dakota) by vote percentages in the 2020 presidential elections between 1st March 2020 and 1st December 2020, in order to capture the buildup to the elections. The data was collected through crawling Instagram’s explore location page. For a given state we collected data for the state’s location along with locations for some of the most populous cities in the state. The figure presents the location wise data collected.

Alluvial Diagram showing the collected dataset. The color of the bars represents the percentage vote given to the respective political party, red being Republican and blue being Democratic. The size of the bars represents the number of collected posts from the specific location. The 3rd column is sorted by the number of posts collected from the location.

We collected a total of 3,917,955 posts of which 78.3% (3,067,740) of the posts were collected from Democratic states, while 21.7%(850,215) of the posts were collected from the Republican states. This disparity in the number of posts is in line with the low number of Instagram users from the top 4 Republican states as compared to the top 4 Democratic states. Since our analysis is based on ratio and percentages, this difference in number was not a major issue.

Analysis

To look at the political conversation going on in the collected data, we plot word clouds of the top political hashtags collected from the captions of posts from the Democratic and the Republican states.

Word clouds containing political hashtags, from post captions for Democratic states.
Word clouds containing political hashtags, from post captions for Republican states.

We observe a higher occurrence of hashtags like ‘bidenharris2020’, ‘trumpsucks’, ‘dumptrump’ in the captions of posts collected from Democratic states, while captions from the Republican states include hashtags like ‘trump2020’, ‘trumpsupporters’ in higher numbers. The partisan polarity in these states is captured in the above hashtags effectively.

In order to see how differently the Democratic states and Republican states reacted to the pandemic in terms of face-coverings and social distancing, we plot a timeline of the average percentage of people wearing masks and group pictures. A group picture is defined as a picture with greater than or equal to 2 faces detected. Group pictures are used as an estimator of adherence to social distancing measures.

Percentage of Group pictures vs time. Republicans states show a higher percentage for the entire time period as compared to Democratic states. The average daily percentage was found to be 2.86% for Democrats while 4.42% for Republicans.

We observe that the percentage of group pictures starts at around the same level for both Democratic and Republican states and diverges as the pandemic grows. The Democratic states have a lower percentage of group pictures, indicating a more likely behaviour to follow social distancing measures. The difference in the daily average percentage of group pictures for Democrats and Republicans was found to be statistically significant.

Percentage of masks detected vs time. Democratic states show a higher percentage for the entire time period as compared to Republican states. The average daily percentage was found to be 8.41% for Democrats while 6.36% for Republicans.

Both Democratic and Republican states show a jump in the percentage of masks, at the beginning of the pandemic, but as the pandemic grows Democratic states show a higher percentage of people covering their faces online as compared to Republican states. The difference in the daily average percentage of masks detected for Democrats and Republicans was found to be statistically significant. This indicates higher mask-wearing among Democrats as compared to Republicans.

Discussion

Our analysis of Instagram finds significant differences between Democratic and Republican states in reaction to non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19. Our findings support the existing on-ground and self-reported surveys, showing significantly higher adoption of face-coverings and social distancing, by Democratic states as compared to Republican states. This goes on to show the relevance of Social Media as a critical tool for understanding and tracking real-world events and sentiments of the population.

If you are interested in the methodology, here is the Link to the preprint

Analysis Dashboard

References

  1. Rader B, White LF, Burns MR, et al. Mask-wearing and control of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the USA: a cross-sectional study. The Lancet Digital Health. 2021;0(0). doi:10.1016/S2589-7500(20)30293-4
  1. Igielnik R. Most Americans say they regularly wore a mask in stores in the past month; fewer see others doing it. Pew Research Center. Published June 23, 2020. Accessed May 3, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/23/most-americans-say-they-regularly-wore-a-mask-in-stores-in-the-past-month-fewer-see-others-doing-it/