Managing the COVID-19 in Canada: Exploring Twitter Communication by Government and Health Officials

ABSTRACT

Since the unfolding of the COVID-19 virus as a global health crisis that threatens public health, government and health officials in Canada and in many other countries used Twitter as an instrument for health communication. It has been a relevant mean for informing and raising public awareness about precautionary measures to better mitigate the pandemic. In Canada, governments and public health institutions at federal, provincial and territorial levels have been using Twitter to spread COVID-19 related public health information to their citizens during the first, second and third waves of the pandemic. In this study, we aimed to investigate the use of Twitter by governments and health institutions at the Federal government of Canada, and Canadian provinces and territories. Specifically, our main purpose is to explore insights from Twitter online public discourse harnessed by the government and the public health institutions in Canada through their official accounts. These insights will be studied from three analysis: Activity, engagement, and trends. To do so, we collected 32,198 tweets published from a total of 62 government (i.e. 29 Twitter accounts) and health accounts (i.e. 33 Twitter accounts) including institutions (e.g ministries) and officials (e.g Prime Ministers accounts) Twitter accounts between 01 September 2020 and 31 August 2021. Our results show that the health and government institutions have been more active during the third wave of the pandemic than the second wave. The results also show that among all the Twitter accounts, the federal representatives and the representatives of the provinces of Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia respectively have been more active. Finally, the results demonstrate that the Twitter users in Canada have been more engaged with the government accounts at the federal level than at the provinces and territories level. © 2022 ACM.