Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Aug 21, 2025)
Date Submitted: Feb 10, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Analyzing Freedom: Understanding Swiss COVID-19 Narratives Through NLP analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Beyond the public health challenges it posed, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of public discourses, particularly regarding moral key terms such as freedom. Understanding how these terms, including freedom, are used across different forms of public communication is critical for promoting an informed dialogue during crises and reducing societal polarization.
Objective:
This study aims to explore the usage of the key moral term freedom within public discourses in Switzerland. It examines the terms’ framing in official press releases, newspapers, and social media to map its usage, identifying discrepancies in the construction of its meaning. The results of this study could aid policymakers in the design of strategies for improving clarity and consistency in public reasoning, and reduce polarization in public discourses.
Methods:
We analyzed three datasets with a NLP pipeline comprising lemmatization, co-occurrence analysis, and semantic network mapping: official press releases from the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (BAG), newspaper articles from major outlets retrieved via Factiva, and social media posts collected via CrowdTangle.
Results:
The analysis revealed notable differences in how freedom was framed across datasets. Government press releases emphasized the need to balance public health responsibilities with personal autonomy, while newspapers highlighted the tension between restrictions and civil liberties. Social media discourse was marked by polarized views, with prominent themes of activism, distrust in authorities, and debates over individual versus collective freedoms.
Conclusions:
The conceptualizations of freedom emerging from the data reflect tensions between individual rights and collective responsibilities during the pandemic. Inconsistent framing across different contexts likely contributed to societal polarization and institutional distrust. The study highlights the need for clearer communication and shared understanding of key moral terms such as freedom, which could help strengthen democratic processes and institutions.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.