  The novel coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage communities across the US.
Opinion surveys identified importance of political ideology in shaping
perceptions of the pandemic and compliance with preventive measures. Here, we
use social media data to study complexity of polarization. We analyze a large
dataset of tweets related to the pandemic collected between January and May of
2020, and develop methods to classify the ideological alignment of users along
the moderacy (hardline vs moderate), political (liberal vs conservative) and
science (anti-science vs pro-science) dimensions. While polarization along the
science and political dimensions are correlated, politically moderate users are
more likely to be aligned with the pro-science views, and politically hardline
users with anti-science views. Contrary to expectations, we do not find that
polarization grows over time; instead, we see increasing activity by moderate
pro-science users. We also show that anti-science conservatives tend to tweet
from the Southern US, while anti-science moderates from the Western states. Our
findings shed light on the multi-dimensional nature of polarization, and the
feasibility of tracking polarized opinions about the pandemic across time and
space through social media data.
