Fury at school boards over masks doesn’t translate to Twitter posts
This summer, school boards across Pennsylvania were left to decide whether their students would wear masks in school this year in response to the pandemic, often at contentious public meetings. In fact, several board meetings were canceled within minutes of starting after parents and other audience members refused to mask up for the meetings.
Some districts then suffered whiplash when the state acting health secretary issued a mask mandate in late August, requiring students, teachers and staff to wear masks when inside. Gov. Tom Wolf said he preferred to keep the decision local but tweeted that an “aggressive nationwide campaign is pressuring school districts to adopt unsafe policies.”
In the aftermath of the mandate, did the fury at school board meetings carry over to Twitter? Not so much.
Reviewing several weeks of tweets on the issue with Paraqeet showed that those tweeting their support for the move tended to be parents or teachers and their posts didn’t engender serious engagement. Much of the anti-chatter was dominated by people either outside the state or who were advancing a political viewpoint or another education-related cause. Although opposition comments were retweeted more than pro-mask posts, they likewise did not spark lengthy lists of replies or dialogue.
The news organization retweeted the most to share the mandate news was The Epoch Times, an international, multilanguage newspaper and media company based in New York City that the New York Times described as “spreading right-wing misinformation to create an anti-China, pro-Trump media empire.”
Another search with different keywords popped Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV to the top influencer spot. Regardless of which outlet was retweeted, the handful of comments on both ranged from badmouthing the governor and expressing anger for not letting schools decide to parents saying children don’t wear the masks correctly anyway and “I’d wear my pants inside out if it protected children.”
One Twitter user with the handle @SlayerWolf11 who describes herself as “exposing the corruption in PA” showed up repeatedly in the searches. Typically, she shared news of protests or other actions against mask-wearing. “Parents are fighting back,” she tweeted after one school board meeting was shut down early because of disruption and lack of mask-wearing. She also tweeted about lawsuits being filed against the mandate, especially one by Sen. Jake Corman. Her posts evoked responses including “Send the kids without a mask or pull them,” and “boycott school.” Others suggested the Senate Republican leader “focus on the audit” because the public can fight “a worthless mandate.”
Several users questioned Wolf’s motivation, as noted in a comment by @winksjinx in Philadelphia: “In other words, you caved in to the teacher unions.” That was echoed by the national director of research for the American Federation of Children, which supports school choice. “He said the quiet part out loud: ‘Among numerous organizations calling for this very, very reasonable precaution are the CDC, the [AAP], & the Pennsylvania State Education Association.’ ”
Neither local opposition nor local support seemed to have carried much influence in the Paraqeet search on the school mask mandate. Some of the most pervasive voices were indeed from outside Pennsylvania, but the support they drew was minor. In retrospect, it seems the loudest voices showed up at their local school board meetings to plead in person with their volunteer board members.