  The COVID-19 outbreak implied many changes in the daily life of most of the
world's population for a long time, prompting severe restrictions on sociality.
The Behavioral Immune System (BIS) suggests that when facing pathogens, a
psychological mechanism would be activated that, among other things, would
generate an increase in prejudice and discrimination towards marginalized
groups, including immigrants. This study aimed to test if people tend to
enhance their rejection of minorities and foreign groups under the threat of
contagious diseases, using the users' attitudes towards migrants in Twitter
data from Chile, for pre-pandemic and pandemic contexts. Our results only
partially support the BIS hypothesis, since threatened users increased their
tweet production in the pandemic period, compared to empathetic users, but the
latter grew in number and also increased the reach of their tweets between the
two periods. We also found differences in the use of language between these
types of users. Alternative explanations for these results may be
context-dependent.
