The COVID-19 pandemic not only posed a global public health crisis but also fueled the rapid spread of misinformation, particularly on social media. Existing studies suggest that political ideology influences susceptibility to fake news, with right-leaning individuals generally displaying higher acceptance of misinformation. However, little research has quantitatively compared how misinformation and skepticism were distributed among different political fractions in Poland. In this study, we analyze pandemic-related narratives among supporters of four major Polish political parties: Law and Justice (PiS), Civic Platform (PO), Confederation, and The Left (Lewica). Using a novel dataset of politically affiliated tweets, we employ BERTopic for topic modeling and GPT-4o for large-scale stance classification to investigate the prevalence and distribution of misinformation. Our findings reveal significant differences in how parties engaged with pandemic-related discourse.

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Political Narratives and Misinformation During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comparative Analysis of Polish Political Parties on Twitter

  • Ewelina Księżniak,
  • Marcin Sawiński

摘要

The COVID-19 pandemic not only posed a global public health crisis but also fueled the rapid spread of misinformation, particularly on social media. Existing studies suggest that political ideology influences susceptibility to fake news, with right-leaning individuals generally displaying higher acceptance of misinformation. However, little research has quantitatively compared how misinformation and skepticism were distributed among different political fractions in Poland. In this study, we analyze pandemic-related narratives among supporters of four major Polish political parties: Law and Justice (PiS), Civic Platform (PO), Confederation, and The Left (Lewica). Using a novel dataset of politically affiliated tweets, we employ BERTopic for topic modeling and GPT-4o for large-scale stance classification to investigate the prevalence and distribution of misinformation. Our findings reveal significant differences in how parties engaged with pandemic-related discourse.