Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Social Media Polarization and Echo Chambers in the Context of COVID-19:
  Case Study   Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the
COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly
politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about
the virus. As it happens with topics that become politicized, people may fall
into echo chambers, which is the idea that one is only presented with
information they already agree with, thereby reinforcing one's confirmation
bias. Understanding the relationship between information dissemination and
political preference is crucial for effective public health communication.
  Objective: We aimed to study the extent of polarization and examine the
structure of echo chambers related to COVID-19 discourse on Twitter in the
United States.
  Methods: First, we presented Retweet-BERT, a scalable and highly accurate
model for estimating user polarity by leveraging language features and network
structures. Then, by analyzing the user polarity predicted by Retweet-BERT, we
provided new insights into the characterization of partisan users.
  Results: We observed that right-leaning users were noticeably more vocal and
active in the production and consumption of COVID-19 information. We also found
that most of the highly influential users were partisan, which may contribute
to further polarization. Importantly, while echo chambers exist in both the
right- and left-leaning communities, the right-leaning community was by far
more densely connected within their echo chamber and isolated from the rest.
  Conclusions: We provided empirical evidence that political echo chambers are
prevalent, especially in the right-leaning community, which can exacerbate the
exposure to information in line with pre-existing users' views. Our findings
have broader implications in developing effective public health campaigns and
promoting the circulation of factual information online.

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The categories of this paper are: gr-qc
20
The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
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The categories of this paper are: q-fin
16
The categories of this paper are: stat
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The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
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The categories of this paper are: cmp-lg
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The categories of this paper are: adap-org
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The categories of this paper are: supr-con
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The categories of this paper are: physics
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The categories of this paper are: quant-ph
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The categories of this paper are: atom-ph
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The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
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The categories of this paper are: hep-th
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The categories of this paper are: astro-ph
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The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
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The categories of this paper are: q-alg