  With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of public policy measures
have been developed to curb the spread of the virus. However, little is known
about the attitudes towards stay-at-home orders expressed on social media
despite the fact that social media are central platforms for expressing and
debating personal attitudes. To address this gap, we analyze the prevalence and
framing of attitudes towards stay-at-home policies, as expressed on Twitter in
the early months of the pandemic. We focus on three aspects of tweets: whether
they contain an attitude towards stay-at-home measures, whether the attitude
was for or against, and the moral justification for the attitude, if any. We
collect and annotate a dataset of stay-at-home tweets and create classifiers
that enable large-scale analysis of the relationship between moral frames and
stay-at-home attitudes and their temporal evolution. Our findings suggest that
frames of care are correlated with a supportive stance, whereas freedom and
oppression signify an attitude against stay-at-home directives. There was
widespread support for stay-at-home orders in the early weeks of lockdowns,
followed by increased resistance toward the end of May and the beginning of
June 2020. The resistance was associated with moral judgment that mapped to
political divisions.
