Symbolic Construction of Public Opinions on Twitter about Cuba's Cooperation amidst the COVID-19 Health Crisis

In a health crisis, info-communicative scenarios for decision-making/action-taking are modified by public opinion in social media, impacting health. The study aims to characterize the symbolic construction of public opinions about Cuba's cooperation amidst the COVID-19 health crisis, reflected in discourses and their symbols on Twitter between December 31, 2020, and January 18, 2021. Related tags include #CubaporlaVida, #CubaporlaSalud, #CubaCoopera, #CubaViva, #CubaSalvaVidas, and #ConunaNuevaSonrisa, accumulating 84,581 tweets. The perspective used is transdisciplinary to integrate the knowledge of social and computer sciences, while the approach is mixed to use polarity metrics. We used data mining on the web to delve into the content-structure-use link and critical analysis of multimodal discourse with a socio-cognitive approach to relate ideological structures. The instrument employed is Stela 5.2 software. The results reflect a polarized discourse, with a predominance of positive and neutral affinities, and the use of retweets, mentions, and metadata to amplify the message. Users directed their questions to political, media, and institutional accounts to talk about the subject.