It sure seems like a lot of people got irate about wearing face masks to slow the spread of COVID-19.
The key word in that sentence is "seems," says a team from the University of Oregon. Researchers including linguistics professor Zhuo Jing-Schmidt tallied up Twitter posts about masks, pro and con. And they found a huge imbalance in favor of masks, but also found a loop in which mainstream media would pick up the anti-mask messages for news stories, effectively amplifying the messages and their perception.
This month's edition of Curious: Research Meets Radio brings in Professor Jing-Schmidt for an overview of this and other research into language and its use.